DACS General Meeting
August 2012

Meeting Review:
Robotics and Beyond

By Jim Ritterbusch

For those who attended expecting to see R2D2 or Rosie or Marvin the Paranoid Android, this was not the place to be. For the rest of us, it was a pleasant surprise presented by Michael Morrissey and Paul Chayka, co-founders of Robotics and Beyond. This is a not-for-profit organization in New Milford aimed at getting kids excited about STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.  (Coincidentally, an article appeared in the online version of The News-Times the same day, where corporations are bemoaning the lack of applicants qualified in STEM.)

Mike Morrissey & Paul ChaykaRobotics and Beyond is almost 10 years old, founded by Michael as a way to introduce his son and two other 7th graders to robotics.  From there, it morphed into a summer camp program aimed at kids aged from 10 to 18.  Enrollment grew steadily with each passing year.  Good ink in The News-Times in 2008 gave the program a helpful boost.  This summer, there are over 100 students attending three separate week-long sessions.  In addition, a junior camp is aimed at the younger crowd, from kindergarten through 4th grade.  Students commute from as far away as Western Massachusetts, and attend for a 5-day week.

The programs are project-based, such that each child or group is given a goal, and then learns to solve it.  More experienced campers mentor the newer recruits.  A project example is to build a robot which follows a tape track across the floor.  An advanced group of repeat students decided to make a “hat snatcher”, to grab a ball cap from a random passerby out the window on the sidewalk below.  In the interest of safety, the “passerby” was a PVC-stick-figure mannequin.  Every robot will be different.  One group constructed theirs from baby-carriage wheels, angle irons, and motors salvaged from electric car windows, all controlled by a microcontroller.

Youngsters learn mechanical construction skills, electrical wiring, interfacing, programming,  ultrasonic range-finding, and more.  There are different levels of programming tools for the microcontroller based robots, from a graphical Lego language through a C-like language used on Arduino microcontrollers.

The “and Beyond” covers a wide variety of wherever the kids' imaginations will lead them.  These might be structures built from marshmallows and Popsicle sticks.  Newspaper and duct-tape provide a medium to build a cross-braced structure.  One group lamented that they had no cold-storage for their brought-lunches, so they constructed a “refrigerator” using thermo-electric solid-state devices.  An egg-drop project builds safety structures around an egg so that it should not break when dropped.  Of course, there are a few failed attempts and broken eggs, but there is always a learning process.

Robotics and Beyond is now a 501(c)3 organization, with office space leased in New Milford.  They have received accolades from industry, as well as recommendations from NASA and the NSF.   Mike and Paul are planning to make these activities their full-time careers.  See their web site at www.roboticsandbeyond.com.

 


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