Pilot Workshop One!
Hello again everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted here, and a lot has happened since our launch post - but let me start with the first pilot workshop for Encouraging Engineering Exploration that we just hosted yesterday afternoon. If you want to do this project yourself, I will link all of the materials and the presentation toward the end of this post - this is an easy and fun project that anyone can do at home!
“Hydraulic robots? Count me in!”
October 26, 2022, Aurora School, Oakland CA
After much preparation, yesterday afternoon we finally made the first step of our journey toward free creative engineering workshops for everyone. Working out of a classroom in Oakland (at my old elementary school!), 15 students prototyped hydraulic robot arms using cardboard, syringes, hot glue, and a whole lot of tape. After a brief lesson on the engineering method, we outlined design goals and constraints as a group, and students brainstormed ideas for what they wanted to do with their robot. As in the real engineering method, students researched potential ideas using an example robot, and then got ready to prototype!
A brief lesson on the concepts and flow of the engineering method came before the project.
Mountains of cardboard were laid across tables, rolls of masking and duct tape, tubing, water, and syringes - our hydraulic pistons. Armed with the knowledge of prototyping and iteration, and set with design goals and constraints, students sat eagerly glancing at the tables. Hot glue guns were ready; as soon as the students were let free to build, an explosion of creativity was let free.
You could feel it in the room. Some needed guidance, others went off on their own -everyone had their own idea and design goal. Truly, it was inspiring.
Click to enlarge ⤵
We ended the workshop with many completed robots and art projects of all sorts of styles. What surprised me the most was the variety of the projects that the students made - some were completely different from the example that I brought in. I ultimately tied this into our reflection and debrief, where we talked about the importance of setting specific design goals and constraints early on so we can work towards building exactly what we want from the very beginning. Overall, it was a huge success and a ton of fun for everyone involved. On the flip side, it was hugely beneficial to our advance toward Encouraging Engineering Exploration’s workshop goals.
What We Learned
This workshop at Aurora was the first step towards our goal of free workshops for everyone, and it held many lessons that I’ll adjust next time around. Here are some of them:
Materials
We went through a lot of tubing, water, and syringes, but not nearly as much cardboard, duct tape, or masking tape as expected. Apparently, kids really want to have many different moving actuators on their robots!
Water is messy! Sometimes the syringe tubes would pop out causing water to spray everywhere. We need to have paper towels on hand.
Varying sizes in the base people were building on caused a lot of early confusion. In the future, making standardized bases for kids to build on is a good idea.
Lesson
We talked a lot about the engineering method in our presentation but didn’t get into the specifics of the arm. This was somewhat on purpose, and due to time-limiting factors was essential. But going into the future, we need to be asking questions about just how much can be left up to raw creativity before the lesson intent becomes blurred. Potentially, more examples of how to do certain things (such as hinges, arms, etc.) could be helpful, but I think that it could be argued against. I’m curious about what you all think about this!
We need to strengthen the conclusion aspect. There needs to be something exciting at the end - a competition maybe, to keep kids engaged through the last few minutes. We want to teach how the engineering method works; the lessons learned by building these robots are only so helpful without a lesson to tie them all together. This also puts into question whether a more integrated lesson-project approach is appropriate, especially for shorter workshops.
Mentors
For this workshop, the timing meant that it was going to be only me, plus a couple of adult mentors that helped with safety and simple guidance during the build process. I knew it was going to be a problem, but with only 10 people, I figured it wouldn’t be too bad. Turns out, I was totally wrong!
In the future, one mentor per 7 or so kids seems reasonable. I hope to pull from my FRC robotics team to get other engineering mentors around my age.
Timing
An hour was definitely pushing it for this workshop, and in the future, it needs to start at more like an hour and a half.
This was much more student count dependent than expected.
Overall, the lessons learned during this first pilot were sometimes predictable, and sometimes completely unexpected. The good thing is that all of these have relatively simple solutions - so I guess I better get working on the next workshop!
Do the project yourself!
If you are interested in doing the project yourself, you are in luck because the materials are all low-cost and readily available online, or at a hardware store nearby. The hardest part is finding a combination of tubing and syringes that work well together, so I will link them here.
Tubes and syringes
Tubing: 3/16th OD 1/8th inch ID. Vinyl tubing is ideal due to its flexibility. Here is a link to a home depot listing online, but it’s likely you could find this locally.
Syringes: You can buy these online for quite cheap. Here are the ones that I found to fit the tubing well.
Key details
It’s important to make sure that syringes and tubing connecting them do not have any air inside them as this can lead to issues. Make sure to first fill one syringe, then connect it to a tube, use the syringe to push any air out of the tube, and dip it back underwater to fill the tube entirely along with the syringe.
Hot glue and masking tape! This project should be fast and fun. Don’t waste time with glue that takes time to set, use hot glue and a healthy amount of duct tape. Have fun with it!
It can be difficult to get the tube onto the syringe the first time. If a child is doing this project, an adult may have to step in and help!
I hope that anyone who tries this project has a ton of fun and success with it. If you do build it, take pictures and send them in through our contact page or in our Discord server! If I get enough, I’ll put them on the website.
Conclusion
Overall, pilot workshop one was a massive success and learning period for both me and the students I was teaching. I think everyone had a ton of fun and aside from being educational, it was extremely motivating and inspiring to me and my goals for this organization. I said I would make this happen for everyone, and I think this was a solid first step.
I look forward to talking to you all again soon.
Peace :)
-Vaughn
