At the June 2017 meeting a new member, Amir Fouladvandi announced his intention to run robotics/programming classes. While the target audience is primarily young (12-18) people, anyone young at heart is of course welcome. It's still a bit fluid at the moment as to how it will actually play out. We may even focus on existing members for an initial exploration, but the hope is to eventually get new members for the club. The course will be based, at least initially, on a wheeled autonomous robot platform called mBot. The mBot is programmed in a graphical drag and drop language called Scratch, which we have seen a couple times in before monthly meetings. Longer term we may develop our own robot platform, as the mBot is a bit pricey at around $160. I reckon we could make something of our own at maybe $30 each.
I have actually started developing a wheeled robot platform myself, but it's light years away from being programmable in mBlock, a derivative of MIT's Scratch. One possibility is that such a development be done by members as a group project, where we pool our skills for a better outcome. I suspect in particular that the programming software/firmware could be challenging. The Scratch language is great for youngsters to learn "coding", but it could take a lot of skill to coerce it to work on our own platform. If you would be interested in a fun activity constructing and programming a robot, or if you would consider contributing your expertise to the development of our own platform, please comment below.
2 Comments
|