When the girls first arrived in the classroom they were given an ice breaker challenge, they had a bunch of recycled materials and they were to create a track for a marble to travel down. The major twist in this challenge was to make the marble travel as slow as it could, it was also a great way to have the girls meet new friends.
The real engineering part came in
thru the Light the
Torch game. The girls had to get their runner to the
torch using the least amount of spaces but they had to move it UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT. First they did it on a grid with only the runner and the
torch after they understood it they flipped the board over and the grid had
obstacles. (No left turn, bushes, a fire & fire truck, one way street and a bridge) This took them more thought but they got it pretty easy. After doing this activity we were able to explain to them about program and how it has a language of its own and how our robots communicate with our controls via programming.
The favorite part for the girls was hearing about our robots and learning about FIRST. They all had lots of questions and were excited to touch and play with the robots.
Today we had the honor of helping The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at USD teaching 200 6th - 8th grader girls about engineering. It was a lot of fun meeting the girls and getting them excited about engineering.
When the girls first arrived in the classroom they were given an ice breaker challenge, they had a bunch of recycled materials and they were to create a track for a marble to travel down. The major twist in this challenge was to make the marble travel as slow as it could, it was also a great way to have the girls meet new friends.
The real engineering part came in thru the Light the Torch game. The girls had to get their runner to the torch using the least amount of spaces but they had to move it UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT. First they did it on a grid with only the runner and the torch after they understood it they flipped the board over and the grid had obstacles. (No left turn, bushes, a fire & fire truck, one way street and a bridge) This took them more thought but they got it pretty easy. After doing this activity we were able to explain to them about program and how it has a language of its own and how our robots communicate with our controls via programming.
The favorite part for the girls was hearing about our robots and learning about FIRST. They all had lots of questions and were excited to touch and play with the robots.
