Collaboration with the Night School Initiative

Five days of the week, some students work with the support staff on campus to teach those who are interested to learn English. It is a very interesting space because it helps all parties involved have better command of the language.

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We, the robotics team members, also spent some time with this group of people and talked to them about the robot. We began the session by introducing ourselves and what Robotics is as an activity. Then there was a detailed account of the FIRST Tech Challenge which was followed by a demonstration of the robot. After this was completed, we had a fun session where all the staff members who are learning English were invited to operate the robot. Personally the best part about the session was that there were many questions asked and we were able to talk about the details of the actual construction. We had an informal question-answer which allowed us to bring out the details of construction. After listening to how we put things together, there was some relevant input from the audience, for example how it would be a better idea to use a kind of rubber sheet rather than zip-ties for the intake mechanism (which is already the plan, but it was nice that they also had the same ideas).

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On the whole it was a good session where we were able to not only talk about the robot but interact with the staff, who were inquisitive and wanted to know a lot of details about  the robot like the amount of time it took to build the robot, the various companies from whom we procured material, the designs we came up with and the budget assigned. It was good to have been able to answer their questions to the best of our abilities.