Cerritos Elementary Fair Demonstration
Date: June 14, 2014
Time: 12:30 - 5:00 P.M.
# of Members: 9
For the past two years, Cerritos Elementary School has organized a small annual carnival event for the community where hundreds of young students and parents enjoy food, arts, and assorted activities. WHS Robotics was proud to host its own demonstration booth to add to the festivities and promote STEM while advertising our annual summer RoboCamp. Whitney’s FLL, FTC, and VRC teams were responsible for a portion of the demo booth. Our FLL team offered passing children the chance to drive treaded LEGO “roach-bots” around the Nature's Fury field. The FTC team showed off champion robot, Windsor, to crowds of people, controlling the reliable robot to score plastic rings on multi-tiered posts. VEX Team 542 challenged kids to a game of freeze tag using squarebots. By touching bumper switches on the sides of these robots, driver control could be disabled or re-enabled. Children were excited for all of these and were eager to experience the different robotic platforms available. Many parents also showed interest in our Robocamp, taking informational brochures to see how else our club could show their children a world of robotics.
While the activities were engaging and exciting, it was a struggle to maintain power supplies for the robots throughout the entire event. In the final hours of the fair, VEX squarebots were being decommissioned for the day one by one, either because of drained robot batteries or drained controller batteries, neither with anymore spares. Furthermore, the young children would often try to push the robots past their limits, causing considerable wear and tear for the robots demanding moderate maintenance. A less rigorous robot interactive game might be better for future demos in this respect. In the end, only Windsor remained operational, but driver control was restricted from the children.
Weather proved to be troublesome for our booth. Considerable winds constantly knocked over the display poster boards, and risked scattered brochures and toppled food. The sheer heat encouraged the wooden platform on which the FTC goal posts were mounted on to warp, giving Windsor a hard time to approach the goals. The intense heat also made it uncomfortable for team members to navigate the foam floor mats when intervening between the VEX freeze tag matches.
Time: 12:30 - 5:00 P.M.
# of Members: 9
For the past two years, Cerritos Elementary School has organized a small annual carnival event for the community where hundreds of young students and parents enjoy food, arts, and assorted activities. WHS Robotics was proud to host its own demonstration booth to add to the festivities and promote STEM while advertising our annual summer RoboCamp. Whitney’s FLL, FTC, and VRC teams were responsible for a portion of the demo booth. Our FLL team offered passing children the chance to drive treaded LEGO “roach-bots” around the Nature's Fury field. The FTC team showed off champion robot, Windsor, to crowds of people, controlling the reliable robot to score plastic rings on multi-tiered posts. VEX Team 542 challenged kids to a game of freeze tag using squarebots. By touching bumper switches on the sides of these robots, driver control could be disabled or re-enabled. Children were excited for all of these and were eager to experience the different robotic platforms available. Many parents also showed interest in our Robocamp, taking informational brochures to see how else our club could show their children a world of robotics.
While the activities were engaging and exciting, it was a struggle to maintain power supplies for the robots throughout the entire event. In the final hours of the fair, VEX squarebots were being decommissioned for the day one by one, either because of drained robot batteries or drained controller batteries, neither with anymore spares. Furthermore, the young children would often try to push the robots past their limits, causing considerable wear and tear for the robots demanding moderate maintenance. A less rigorous robot interactive game might be better for future demos in this respect. In the end, only Windsor remained operational, but driver control was restricted from the children.
Weather proved to be troublesome for our booth. Considerable winds constantly knocked over the display poster boards, and risked scattered brochures and toppled food. The sheer heat encouraged the wooden platform on which the FTC goal posts were mounted on to warp, giving Windsor a hard time to approach the goals. The intense heat also made it uncomfortable for team members to navigate the foam floor mats when intervening between the VEX freeze tag matches.