Last day has come and gone

It's been a little over six months since I started work on Makers Club. I have tried to make an entertaining and educational program that allowed the young men to learn about engineering  and science.  For the most part I feel we have achieved that goal.  I think I have learned more from the guys in Makers Club then they have learned from me.


Now that the preface is over lets get to the Meat and Potatoes if you don't mind me mixing my metaphors. Robots.

Big nasty monster robots.  We didn't do that.  We did make some very nice little ram bots for robot sumo.  While I have built little robots before, I had never built something on the scale of six robots from scratch while ridding herd on six energetic kids.  I normally do my projects in a quite room at 3 or 4 in the morning.  I love using that quite time to concentrate on what I make. Working with these guys has helped me learn about my own limitations  in a way that someone that hasn't taught a group of 4 through 7th graders will never understand.

I envie the teachers of my young makers.  They get to help and in some cases push these guys to learn.  I had the benefit of their work.  I got to take what they had taught and direct it into other paths.  And I got to pick the fruits that the teaching staff at OLPH had planted.

We did have some failure in the project this year.  I had not used the kits we bought before and we found that the parts are not as robust as we needed for the robots.  I also had to spend more time doing direct hands on repairs to the robots because of the screws stripping, and the wires being smaller then in the first set I had examined.  Also the cars we took our radios from were harder to solder then the one I had first sourced.  These are all problems we had to overcome this year.

Another big problem was our need of a permanent place for us to meet where we can leave our tools and projects. Having the guys take there projects home as we were working on them made the projects even harder since some parts were lost and hard to replace.    These challenges are the hurdles that helped our group grow.

Now a bit about the robots.  We took remote controlled cars from Dollar general and dual gear boxes from Robot Marketplace and combined them to build our robots.  The cars were the source of our Transmitters, and Receivers.  Each of the receivers had balanced h-bridges to control the power and steering.  The H-bridges gave us a chance to replace the motors in the cars with a set of matched motors from the gear boxes.  This let us have matched left and right tank steering for greater control. We built all the bots on a wedge design. The large black box on the back of the robots is the battery pack from the car after we cut the axles off and rewired the boxes for the new circut board locations.  
We had planed to glue Legos to the robots and joust with them but test, field trips, and the problems with the gearboxes made getting the jousting done a problem.   I hope to have some time next fall to work on the robots again. 

I want to say thanks to
Curtis (please hold the solder still), Cole, Cole squared (you guys fight over which one you are) Mr. B (yes Bernard I did learn your name sorry it took so long), Jacob ( I still think Star Blazers is better then Naruto:Shippuden), and Jason ( please no climbing into the dishwasher).  You have made this season of Makers Club fun and surprising and I hope you feel the same way.

And remember Everybody Put on your safety glasses.