by Jojo Rios, her black laptop computer on her one of her knees, placed her hand on a blue Linkbot that was supposed to whir, click and putter along on a 4-by-6-foot mat in front of her as teammate Zoey Harbath looked on.
Inside an annex building Friday morning at Solano Community College’s Vacaville Center, the two middle school students were showcasing the softball-size plastic bot encased around a small electric motor. Although nudged by hand, it did not seem to move on the mat, dominated by an image of a racetrack, with three of its four main areas designated by names such as Pit Stop, Debris Grid and Lookout Area.
No matter. Some minutes earlier in an adjacent room at the North Village Parkway campus, they presented an overview of their project, dubbed The spacelets, to their fellow 38 middle and high school students in the annual free Girls in Robotics Leadership summer camp, the first of three in June.
Hosted by the Solano County Office of Education, the camps are free and designed to empower area youths, particularly girls but also some boys, to develop leadership skills and explore STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), with STEM professionals as mentors, through hands‑on robotics, coding, Linkbot and Arduino projects, the latter a microcontroller-based board that can, among other things, control a ‘bot.
For their project, Zoey and Jojo selected Uranus as a location. The seventh planet from the Sun, it is considered an ice giant, a cold planet, blue-green in color due to methane in its atmosphere.
Using a colored slide to explain their project, they asked — with 70 of their campmates, parents, friends and relatives seated at desks and SCOE staff members off to one side, listening — “How could we survive the freezing conditions on Uranus?
They next added, “Our robot is exploring Uranus to gather information about Uranus weather conditions,” followed by “We are collecting data to see how harsh the conditions are,” “The sensor is a drill bit that will prevent it from getting hurt by pushing the obstacles out of the way,” and, injecting a bit of humor, “The robot also has ear muffs to keep it warm in the cold.”
Another pair of students, Yara Ibrahim and Melinda Mackley, the navigator and commander, respectively, of their project, LAEA, for Linkbot Asteroid Exploration Agency, sited their project on an asteroid, a small, rocky or metallic celestial body that orbits the Sun, typically found in the so-called “asteroid belt” between Mars and Jupiter.
The two posed their project question, “What are asteroids made of?” Their ‘bot collected data about the minerals and makeup of asteroids.
Planetary weather seemed to be on the minds of Brooklyn Maldonado and Shaan Chaudhry. Their project’s title? Stormy Shuttle. Its location? Jupiter.
What question did they pose? How did Jupiter’s “Great Red Spot” begin? The slide projection indicated their robot explored the spot. The data they collected were wind speeds, as the sensors on their ‘bot “are a wind speed detector and a satellite-like object “that helps the robot move through the harsh winds.”
Prior to the project reviews and showcases, Steph Morgado, program manager for STEAM Robotics Educational Services, welcomed students and parents to the camp showcase, the fifth day of the weeklong camp, which included daily instruction and objectives: coding introduction, programming linkbots, a field trip to a biomanufacturing lab across the street to the main campus building, with host and guide Jim DeKloe, a professor of biological sciences and biotechnology and founder of SCC’s Industrial Biotechnology four-year degree program.
Morgado said the weeklong camps was intended “to make the mission come alive.”
Andrea Lemos, SCOE’s deputy superintendent for educational services and student programs, thanked parents and families, saying, “I know it’s hard to get them (the students) here and keep them here.”
To the students, most of them sitting in front of her on the floor, she said, “I want you to think about what you learn here this week” in the months and years to come.
Camp veteran and coach Vera Cho, 17, said the students were charged with designing a ‘bot “that had something to do with the solar system,” and then programming it.
A student in the Early College program at Rodriguez High in Fairfield, she said that during the camp an emphasis is place on “presentation skills and leadership skills,” with the latter focused on the “uplifting and encouraging peers.”
Cho, who boasts a 4.55 weighted GPA and wants to attend UC Berkeley, Caltech or MIT, said most of the students ranged in age from 11 to 16.
The camp, she noted, is all about “access to engineering, especially for girls,” with “a bigger purpose to close the gender gap in STEM,” which, she added, has been dominated historically by males.
Gender diversity, in general, asserted Cho, “helps improve a company’s overall performance” and its production output.
Additionally, the students learn new levels of social interaction during the camp, as students sometimes tell her of about “feeling left out.”
As they were getting ready to attend the awards ceremony at camp’s end, Jojo, 11, a seventh grader at Norte Dame School in Vacaville who enjoys “coding challenges,” appreciated most of all that camp leaders “made everyone feel they’re involved and not left out.”
Zoey, 11, and a seventh grader at Jepson Middle School in Vacaville, said she liked coding and using the robot.
Shy Rios, Jojo’s mother, who looked as the girls ended their project showcase, said Jojo has studied robotics for three years at Notre Dame and STEM for two.
Jojo and her sister, she said, told her and her husband “what they were interested in” and they tried to support them.
“We are their cheerleaders,” said Rios.
The second Girls in Robotics Leadership summer camp begins next week and student showcase will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m. June 20 at SCC’s main Fairfield campus, Building 1800A, rooms 1818 and 1819, 4000 Suisun Valley Road.
The camp’s third week begins June 23 and the student showcase will be from 10 to 11:30 a.m. June 27 at SCC’s Vallejo Center, in the multipurpose room and lecture hall, 545 Columbus Parkway.
“Through experiential learning in robotics, engineering fundamentals, and career exploration with female role models, SCOE aims to inspire participants consider C-STEM related studies or careers,” Jennifer Leonard, a spokeswoman for SCOE, said of the camps.
Besides a collaboration with UCD’s C-STEM, the program is made possible through Valero Benicia Refinery, private donors, and career guest speakers from ENGIE, PG&E, and UCD.
No comments:
Post a Comment