By STEVEN JUPITER
BRANDON—If you ever wondered how humanity’s subjugation will go down, you can rest easy knowing that our robot overlords will commence their global conquest at the American Legion in Brandon, where a group of kids just finished a weeklong Robotics Camp sponsored by the Brandon Rec Department. Six hours a day, five days a week, a team of 12 campers (aged 8 to 13) learned the basics of robotics using specialized LEGO kits called SPIKE Prime that allowed them to build and program LEGO-based robots that followed commands and completed simple tasks.
The Robotics Camp was a summer extension of the Robotics Team that meets at Otter Valley Union High School during the fall and winter and is open to kids aged 9 to 14, even if they don’t attend OV. The Camp and Team are both led by Kevin Booth and Jonathan Fries (“freeze”), with assistance from OV Tech Ed teacher Devon Karpak.
Booth is the main driver behind both efforts. By day, he’s a Scientific Instrument Technician at Middlebury College, maintaining and repairing scientific equipment for the physics, geology, chemistry, and biology departments. In his down time, he coaches kids on the finer points of LEGO robotics—sensors, motors, and coding—with an eye toward the annual FIRST LEGO League competition, where the kids get to put what they’ve learned into practice by assembling a specified design that they’ve been refining for months with their SPIKE Prime kits.
“Last year the competition was at Norwich University,” said Booth. “For a new team, we did well. It was a commendable showing.”
At the last competition, the kids were tasked with constructing a robotic “superpowered” windmill that cranked out units of “energy” as it turned, those units being pieces of LEGO.
But the kids do get to just play around and explore on their own during their sessions.
“We encourage the team to research designs that have been tested and make their own modifications, with the goal of making more original products,” said Booth. “We give the kids the opportunity to design on their own, even if it doesn’t always run well.” He reckons that the team’s efforts are 90% existing designs and 10% original modifications.
Booth also emphasizes what he calls “gracious professionalism,” which is the engineering equivalent of sportsmanship.
“Kids develop grit. You see them in real time trying, failing, learning. They learn a lesson and try again. I’m really happy to see a space where the ability to fail is held up as positive,” said Booth.
Some of the tasks the kids had to master at the summer camp included programming sensors to make a robot follow a line of colored tape on a flat surface. This was a skill that Jonathan Fries taught the students right away.
“By the end of the first session, everyone had solved the problem,” said Booth.
SPIKE Prime kits use LEGO’s proprietary graphic language that breaks commands into colored blocks that can be dragged and dropped to create different sequences to perform different tasks. It’s a simplified, visual version of the Python computer language.
“It makes coding more accessible, less persnickety,” said Booth.
The kids did have a chance to use a 3-D printer to make a more “sci-fi” robot with interchangeable parts, akin to Mr. Potatohead. The campers were broken into 3 groups, each of which was responsible for a particular body part. The goal was to make them all fit together.
“We teach collaboration, not competition,” Booth noted.
On the last day of the summer camp, there was a demonstration for parents to see what their kids had learned.
“Parents really saw their kids grow,” said Booth.
The programs are sponsored by Brandon Rec. The summer program was assisted by Elijah Tucker and Bonnie Moore, who acted as counselors.
If your kids are between 9 and 14, interested in STEM, and love building things, the Robotics Team may be just the ticket to get their mad scientist juices flowing. The world won’t be conquered on its own…someone has to build the robots, after all.
