This year was the fourth year in a row that I have worked with ACCESS (the Aboriginal Community Career Employment Services Society) at their careers center on East Hastings Street, Vancouver to run a week-long summer camp to teach young people how to code. Each year that we have run this course it has gone more smoothly than the year before and has had more engagement and excitement from the teens that we’ve worked with. Now our course is based primarily on programming robots built from LEGO and culminates in a robotic race! Additionally, this year we were lucky to be able to partner with academics in the forestry department at UBC and FIRST Robotics BC.
Go robot go! This was the course that the kids had to navigate. How would you do it?
Last year we split the focus of the course between LEGO robotics and python programming skills. Given that the course is four days long we made the (probably blindingly obvious decision) that we were trying to do too much, too quickly. Now we have made LEGO robotics the focus of the course which is based around the flow-chart-style programming language made for LEGO Spike (the robotics kits we were using). We have structured the course so that the young people slowly build up their programming skills while modifying their robot base the way they want and add components that give extra skills to the robot (and teach them new skills, too!). Python is a key feature of the LEGO spike kits; keen attendees were shown how to use a professional programming language for their robots.
The kids could design their robots – all it had to do was navigate the track and try to not hit the obstacles.
These lessons in making their robot culminated in the main event of the week – a race around a track! We made a course on the floor with colored tape and obstacles. The kids had to figure out how to program their robot to stay within the taped-off area, navigate the track and avoid hitting anything that we’d placed on the course. Extra points were awarded to the robot that completed the robot that hit the fewest obstacles, to the coder with the most interesting solution and to the robot that performed the greatest celebration as it crossed the finish line. That last category had two joint winners. One robot played the riff from the Buddy Holly song by Weezer and the other flailed its arms madly as it finished.
You can’t tell from a still image how madly this robot’s arms were flailing
Finishing off the week, the young people were taken on a tour of a computer driven woodshop in the Faculty of Forestry where they experimented with VR systems to help optimize finishing products and saw a robot make a 1-inch 20-sided die with an 8-inch circular saw! Following the tour, we had an amazing talk showing how programming skills and robotics are important for tracking biodiversity across British Columbia and those same programming skills can be used to protect woodlands and fragile ecosystems. We were very lucky to be lent four robotics kits from FIRST Robotics BC which vastly improved the kids’ experiences of the week, so they were each able to build their own robot. The only downside of having all those robotics kits was the five-hour sorting session to make sure each kit had the right number of pieces (including 72 1 cm black connectors) in each of the twelve boxes!
I know what my favorite part of the woodshop tour was – seeing this CNC-cut icosahedron (or d20). Thanks to Lief Eriksen!
There are a lot of rewarding parts of running these courses. Seeing young people who from the start are able to grasp difficult concepts, kids who don’t think they can do it but with a small amount of prompting are able to win the race around the track, or getting a teen who doesn’t really want to be there excited about their robot’s victory dance might be some of the best bits, though. I am very lucky to be able to work with these young people every year and I am grateful to ACCESS for hosting us, The UBC Faculty of Forestry for showing us around, FIRST Robotics BC for the use of their robotics kits, to my clients for accommodating my time away from the desk. If you would like to contribute to the continued success of this camp next year, please reach out! Let’s help even more young people discover the joy of coding!
