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Jacob Rothfus
International STEM Academy - ISA
The International STEM Academy is an organization that I and 6 other students created, to deliver a robotics camp in Beijing, China. Of the 7 people, 5 were high school students and 2 college students. Over the course of 3 months in the Spring of 2018 we created a new curriculum to teach robotics to children of the ages 9 to 13. The course included basic physics, mechanics, and programming. We delivered the camp to 20 students in Beijing in July.
Our Chinese partners, Happy Learning Space, paid for our airfare for our team (and 3 adult mentors) to fly to China for 2 weeks. We spent the first week site-seeing and the second week conducting the camp for the kids. Most of them spoke some English. Fortunately, 3 people on our team spoke reasonable Chinese. In addition, we had made contact, prior to the trip, with a high school in Beijing and convinced 4 high school students to join us for the camp as counselors.
It was a great experience for us, and we feel for the campers too! Our Chinese partners have already asked us to come back next summer.
The Camp
The camp was structured around the "LEGO Mindstorms" robotics kit, and the associated EV3 controller. Each kit consisted of: the controller, 3 motors, 4 sensors, and a bunch of LEGO parts for building robots.
We created a booklet that provided information for the basic "build" of the robot we were to use throughout the camp. I was responsible for the software section of the curriculum.
The software we used to program the robot was the "standard" Mindstorms software, with which I created a sequence of training programs that the kids pursued. (more needed here...)
In addition to Mindstorms, we used a few other "online" resources such as Fantastic Contraption and LightBot.