As school holidays began for high school students in New Zealand, AURA took the opportunity to host two “rookie workshops” in conjunction with the Kiwibots for students who are new to VEX Robotics. On each of Monday the 2nd and Tuesday the 3rd of June, we held two sets of educational workshops – mechanical and programming. 24 students attended the event each day, with 22 people participating in the Mechanical workshops over the two days, and 26 in the Programming workshops.
Students participating in the programming workshops were given a modified VEX Protobot, usually used by students in the University of Auckland Department of Mechanical Engineering. We started from scratch with no assumed knowledge of programming of any kind, and worked our way through basic autonomous using waits, variables, functions, tasks, timers, debugging and other essential basic programming concepts. Also for some of the advanced students we gave a brief example of a PID controller. A group of AURA members guided them through the process of creating an autonomous routine to complete a task that challenged the students by making their robot drive forwards/backwards, rotate and pick up and put down a aluminium can, all while maintaining accuracy.
In the mechanical workshops, students were split into three groups and given identical kits of parts to build with. After a quick presentation about some different drive systems, each group of students spent the morning building a robotic chassis, with help from AURA team members. These robots then competed in two challenges: an obstacle course and a robotic sumo match. In the afternoon the focus turned to lift systems. Another presentation explained gear ratios and various styles of lift before the students made their own systems to hold as many “Sack Attack” sacks as possible, and lift them as high as they could.
The students involved were a very hard-working group, and were great at taking in all the information that was given to them in such a short space of time. We did our best to teach them all the necessary skills to compete and be successful in the upcoming VEX scrimmages, and look forward to seeing them all go far in their robotics and engineering endeavours.