Important note: This is a four day long class, with eight hours of content, filled with interrelated and likely novel topics in STEAM, with each session depending on the previous day. If you miss a day, you're going to be unable to participate fully in the rest of the program, and staff has an extremely limited capacity to get people 'caught up', especially during the session. Please only register if you're confident you'll be able to go to all four days.

In this year's steam camp, you'll be building a wheeled bot - a simple two-wheeled device around the size of a shoebox, controlled by code you write. Please note that this is subject to availability of supplies - the planned activities may be changed without notice, but if all the parts arrive on time and everything goes according to plan you should be bringing home your own robot that you can build and code on at the end of this. Or take apart for your own projects - some of the parts are quite versatile.

Age Range: This program is aimed at the 9-12 demographic but the real requirements are soft skills: A level of literacy and abstract reasoning is required for line coding - they'll need to be able to spell things right, get semicolons in the right places, count brackets, and shift between ways of thinking about code. This will make for a challenging but doable introduction of how to code in general, but we'll be assuming no knowledge of line coding or C.

Fine motor skills are required for the builds, good listening skills are required for some of the trickier bits, and care and patience is required when working with fragile parts like the ones that go into this build - we have the parts we have, and if they break their thing because they got frustrated or weren't paying attention, there's limited capacity to come back from that - they might just have a broken thing and not be able to complete the program.

Topics:

Draft Timeline -

Day 1: Assembly of Mechanical Parts + Customization

Day 2: Wiring and Electrical Testing + Theory.

Day 3: Arduino/C coding for making wheeled robots go + Test drives and calibration

Day 4: Maze/Racing Challenges + Wiring in sensors and additional parts.