My students tear into the project of the day. We have fixed tv's, printed prosthetic hands on our 3d printer, built numerous robots, printed a drone body, worked on an electric car, fixed cell phones and what ever else may walk through the door. We focus on our robots but never know what may come.
My students are from a poor area with limited opportunities to work in technology.
Our school provides a robotics program at no cost to the students so that they may achieve that which they can do. We compete in the VEX Robotics Competition and the Robofest competition. In the Robofest competition, the students drew in CAD and printed on the 3D printer the robot that they will use at our event in April. In the VEX Robotics competition, a total of 15 trophies have been picked up by my students so far this year. The students will compete in one more tournament this year. They will also be competing in the SkillsUSA Mobile Robotics (trying to maintain our gold and silver medals in the state for year 4) and Urban Search and Rescue bomb disposal. They hope to improve on our national finish last year of 9th in the country this year. 55% of my students graduated last year with robotics scholarships and were able to continue their education in the robotics field. Great give'm a chance!
My Project
This is all part of the design process. If you have a part that fits, why must you spend the time to reproduce it in a CAD environment to reprint. This will allow us to scan parts in that are known to fit the requirements and eliminate the time consuming step of CAD rendering. This will not replace the requirement for the students to use the CAD programs just reduce the actual "production" time on a project if we have known parts (gears, sprockets, chain, standard metal parts...)
This is just providing the students with another tool for them to use in the process.
What I have learned in the 20 years I have been teaching is that the students strive to achieve exactly what you demand in that if you set the bar low, you get low results.
I do my best to make sure that the students understand that you must always set your goals high, the higher (not ridiculous) the better. The higher I set the bar, the better they are. This is just another way to raise the bar of success for the students another notch.
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