Dallas Women in STEM

By Lin, Tycho, Max, Jayesh, Janavi, Omar, and Austin

Task: Teach LEGO EV3 and 3D modelling to girls

The Yale club of Dallas organized a STEM event for groups of girls in the city. We took the Mobile Tech XPerience out front for 3D modelling and set up 8 EV3s with laptops and a sumo field inside.

Programming

We led 6-8 girls at a time through the EV3 environment to make a basic sumo program, going through a tournament, and then a final grand melee at the end of the sessions. A couple had experience with EV3, more with Vex, but this session was a lot of their first experiences with programming and robots. Tycho taught the thought process of the program as we went through the steps and I presented on a projector as he went, sometimes taking over talking when we needed breaks. The port view in the programming environment was a great tool to explain the color sensor's light intensity measurement as we could just ask everyone to plug in their bots and see how the numbers changed with the environment. The session was too short to really let them explore what they could do in the program, but we did give hints that the Power variable was something they could tweak. The girls that took the risks in their program generally found that option and won the round robin.

Everyone in the room had a bunch of fun, chaperones included. One girl realized that she had a NXT at home, and now that she knew she could do cool stuff with it, she was excited to try it out. A lot of the teachers asked about the competition levels, and we're hopeful that some of the kids will join a FLL team and the 8th graders going to high school will look for a FTC or FRC team.

Teaching Sumobots at #DallasWEST! #omgrobots #mobiletechxperience #dallascityoflearning

A post shared by Iron Reign Robotics FTC (@team6832) on Mar 11, 2017 at 12:15pm PST

Modelling

For the first deployment in a while all 4 printers worked! We were able to print every single design from the day. A couple of the laptops don't have the correct export to STL option, but we were able to work around it by grabbing a flash drive and bringing the file over to a different one. The groups in each session were pretty small compared to the waves that normally come by in an expo, so we could spend a good amount of time making sure no-one was lost. Some people grabbed the wrong design when they came back, but we've gotten the swing of things and sent text notifications to the teachers pretty quickly. Since we were parked out front the groups passed us on the way out and picked up their keychains.