Since we taught kids at YMCA about robotics last year, we established a new club dedicated to introducing LEGO Mindstorms to elementary school students. Every Wednesday, a small group of our team members commuted to the local YMCA to host a robotics program in conjunction with an existing after school program for elementary schoolers.
One of the robots built in our last session, where students were challenged to build a battlebot!
Week by week, we taught elementary schoolers how to build a LEGO Mindstorms robot, how to use the coding blocks to create their own programs, and how to utilize sensors! We later experimented with having the children compose their own melodies and use switch blocks to code the robots so that the robot played a different note for each color it was driven over. They then used colored construction paper to have the robots play their melodies.
This program nicely complements our ESSO Robotics On Campus program, allowing even more young students to participate in robotics. We hope that students graduating from this program will want to continue working on robotics in FIRST!