Let’s get back to building things

Let’s get back to building things

Why robotics might be the most valuable activity in education today

BY MARIE PLANCHARD
Director of World Education Markets
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks
www.solidworks.com

Kids don’t build things anymore. We buy our children toys. They use them. They break them. We throw the toys away.

Meanwhile, many of a youth’s most meaningful experiences occur in the virtual world. And while so many parents are attuned to the value of sports and that’s great creativity is too often overlooked. At least the kind that resembles engineering, a proficiency our nation’s future hinges on.

“Hey, Mom, look what I made!” I heard one of my third-graders exclaim after completing a catapult with one of our CAD tutorials. She was glowing.Mom was glowing less. “What are we going to do with that?” she replied. You would have thought her daughter were carrying a skunk.

This sad scene illustrates why I think student robotics programs are about the most important things we offer in the early education of our children. Whether Botball for middle schoolers or AUVSI for college students and beyond, these programs make relevant to the science and math that students are trying to learn in the classroom and provide the foundation for rewarding careers.Getting the math and science problems right can make the difference between a robot that works and one that collapses. Working with robots also teaches important cognitive lessons: how to tackle a problem, propose a solution, test it out, accept failure, learn from it, try again, and repeat until you succeed. Competing teaches team-building and sustains competitors’ creative energy.

Farm as lab

Engineering was a more direct path for me. I became an engineer after growing up on my grandfather’s farm with a father who owned an auto repair shop. When I tinkered with a John Deere and eventually learned to do repairs, it wasn’t a novelty; it was just what I enjoyed. When I became one of the first women at my school to earn an engineering degree, it wasn’t a gender-freighted moment. It was just the culmination of what I loved. Today, in our knowledge economy, we have to manufacture these experiences, but they can be just as exciting if not more so.

We at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks sponsor a host of robotics programs, teams, and competitions with SolidWorks software. Although it’s powerful enough for the world’s foremost professional engineers, the software is easy enough that a middle schooler can learn the basics and render his or her vision for a competition robot.

SolidWorks also has tools that simulate real world stresses and strains so that students can address some of their design mistakes on the screen to reduce real-world trial and error. For more advanced students, SolidWorks has tools for examining the air, water, carbon, and energy impacts of students’ design decisions. It goes without saying that this proficiency might be important for the future as well.

By learning the software and applying it to the robots, students are exposing themselves to tools and concepts real professionals use, and synthesizing their classroom learning. And on a practical level, they are grooming themselves for employment. For example, older students can obtain certifications such as Certified SolidWorks Associate, an important credential for employers.

Educational resources

Here is an expansive set of SolidWorks robotics tutorials we offer for the beginner:
www.solidworks.com/sw/education/9931_ENU_HTML.htm
Here are some of our tutorials for designing Lego-based robotics creations:
www.solidworks.com/sw/education/10039_ENU_HTML.htm
And VEXplorer Robotics resources:
www.solidworks.com/sw/education/vex-robot-design-kit.htm
Some robotics contest links:
www.solidworks.com/sw/education/bots-design-competitions.htm

‘Sabertooth’: a very sharp project

And here is the website for a project that inspires me to no end: sabertoothwpi.com

It’s the Sabertooth Robotics team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Their initiative is pretty ambitious for a senior design project. They have designed (and are now deep into the prototyping phase of) a high-mobility quadruped (that is, four-legged) robot capable of traversing terrain otherwise impassible by wheeled vehicles.

Specifically, the robot will be able to ascend and descend stairs with a predetermined gait. With each step, the robot will recover power lost during that step using a spring system resembling human tendons and ligaments. The robot incorporates a computer vision system for staircase recognition, obstacle avoidance, and distance calculation. A robot that can traverse obstacles, go down into holes, and climb stairs would be quite useful in disaster aftermath like we’ve seen in Haiti and Japan.

Several of the Sabertooth team members list youth robotics competitions in their already impressive curriculum vitae. It’s no coincidence.

“A lot of students are motivated by FIRST Robotics or other types of robotics activities,” said mechanical engineering professor and Sabertooth team advisor Stephen Nestinger. “It’s a great platform to get kids thinking about robots in from an engineering perspective. Competitive drive sustains interest plays an important role.”

He likes to see a tight integration between robotics, the will to win and the academics. At any age, integrating math and science with the real world can bring home lessons. The classic example is using a marble on a table top to demonstrate the interplay between motion, mass, distance, velocity, friction and other physics principles.

But consider something like Tickle Me Elmo. Nestinger notes that the cuddly creature is actually a robot. For precocious children, it would be fun to dismantle dramatically shifting their perspective on the product’s essence.

When it comes to school robotics competitions, Nestinger says mentors are critical. They should do only what is necessary to keep students headed in the right direction. Never take over the whole project. “The trick is to teach the principle, display the passion, and let the kids do the work themselves,” says Nestinger.

“And rather than have students scrambling against super-tight deadlines, it’s best to allow them to go through the entire engineering process,” he says. “Find a way to let them analyze the challenge, develop a design, prototype it, see what works and what doesn’t, reanalyze, redesign, and so on. That will definitely make kids more inspired and keep them in the stream of this discipline.”

Last year, Nestinger was a judge in the First Lego League competition. He asked some of the middle schoolers who were competing questions about how they came to make their design decisions. “They were just glowing with enthusiasm about robotics. Kids at that age aren’t generally too effusive, but the answers come spilling out of them. It’s inspiring.” ■