Robotics Camp

For the past few summers, ASU has been running a summer robotics camp. I have been part of the staff for the last two summers. (See my post about last year's camp here). The camp lasts for two weeks, and introduces students to programming concepts. The tools used are used were Alice (an introductory programming environment created by CMU), LEGO Mindstorm NXT robot kits, and Microsoft Robotics Studio. This year we added a web publication component. This consisted of team pages (hosted on Google sites) and YouTube videos.

The first session, "Camp7up", was open to students 7th grade and up. In the first learning activity, the students created videos and games using Alice. 11 of the 15 teams managed to post videos of their efforts to YouTube. After that, they went on to program the robots using the NXT-G programming environment. Games consisted of a maze and their favorite, SumoBots.

The second session was geared towards high school students. The students learned to program robots using Visual Programming Language (VPL), supported by Robotics Studio. There were four competitions, automatic maze navigation, collecting balls in a maze, SumoBots, and a game where students controlled robots against each other in an arena to see whose robot could collect the most balls. In this session, we provided students with videos collected over the space of the two week camp and asked them create and post their own videos. 11 of the 16 teams in the high school camp did just that.

The videos (well, most of them) created by the students are very entertaining to watch. You can see them on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AsuRobots09

The instructors (including me) also helped the students set up their sites and publish some videos. Our efforts are not nearly as creative as the students, but help document the various activities. You can see our efforts in the team pages as well --

The team pages for the first session: https://sites.google.com/a/asu.edu/asu-summer-robotics-camp-7up/

The team pages for the second session: https://sites.google.com/a/asu.edu/asu-summer-robotics-camp-2009-session-2/

All in all, these camps (and the many others like them run across the country) are a lot of fun to organize and run, and the students seem to enjoy these activities.