By: Amanda Carron
On November 17th, our Makerspace was visited by the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) class of Profile High School for a day of robotics and competition! For the past two months, I have been visiting Mr. Kevin Briere’s workshop at Profile twice a week to develop skills in areas such as LEGO robotic motion, navigation, autonomy, and end effectors ultimately leading up to a day long event at WMSI to test out their robots.
Founder and guest speaker for the day Bill Church started the competition by discussing artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning with the same LEGO robots that the students were using for the competition!
The five competing groups needed to not only build a robot that could navigate the course and drop off game pieces such as foam balls and styrofoam boxes, they also needed to strategize. Different parts of the course and how it was navigated amounted to different point values based on difficulty level.
Solution diversity was one highlights of the day, including this team that created a robot that could travel along a slackline above the course.
WMSI started Profile’s STEAM class and has been collaborating with Mr. Briere since 2013! This year will be the third year that WMSI has hosted the students to compete against each other. As their instructor, it was a wonderful experience to see the growth and development in the students’ building and coding skills as well as witnessing their resiliency through iteration; an energy they brought with them to competition day. This mixed with their creativity and playful nature made for another awesome program and culminating day at WMSI!
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