ChickTech Robotics 2015

I've spent a lot of the past year designing and testing a low-cost robot that could be assembled and programmed in a workshop. It has been, in one form or another, demonstrated at three Maker Faires this year. I finally got a chance to put the project to a full test for ChickTech's Portland High School workshop. 

The event was held at Portland State University. There were more than one hundred students that got to chose between eight different workshops. We had fourteen girls for robotics. We spent the first day building the robot and learning how to program an Arduino microcontroller.

The second day we finished the robot and learned how to program it. In my workshops I always emphasize that makers have to patient and persistent, and the girls, most of whom had no prior programming or electronics experience, did a great job in picking up those skills.

At the end of the event, the girls got a chance to show off what they had learned to family and friends. This is always the pay off for me as I hear them proudly explain things I was teaching them just hours earlier. It always makes all the time planing, preparing, and teaching well worth it.