Robot Club

I wrote a grant! And my project was funded! I am thrilled and fascinated by grant writing. I look a course during my Masters in Library Science program and it honestly was so helpful. When I went to write a grant for this robot club, I knew exactly what to do, and when I did have questions, I had my professor as a resource to turn to. I couldn’t have asked for a better first grant writing experience!

The grant was from the Indiana State Library Foundation, and the requirements can be found here. The grant is so open ended, it could have been written for anything! About a year prior, our wonderful representative from the Indiana State Library came to us with a professional development day called “Robot Petting Zoo”. It is exactly what it sounds like: she brought the robots and we were able to tinker with them and see how they worked! I instantly took a liking to Dash by Wonder Workshop, and I really wanted to get a set for the library.

My interest in Dash, plus my best friend emailing me the link to this grant application was the perfect combination! I wrote the grant in the winter, and was notified in late December that the project would be funded. When I received the check, I immediately purchased the robots and accessories that I outlined in my grant, and we got moving on the specifics of Robot Club!

I love this photo because they look like a boy band.

Here is a list of (and links to) the materials I was able to purchase from the grant funding:

Dash Robot x5

Launcher for Dash x2

Xylophone for Dash x2

Sketch Kit for Dash x2

Whiteboard Mat for Sketch Kit x1

Challenge Cards x1

The basic flow of the club is as follows:

1. 10 kids register for the program (3 meetings per club)
2. I put them in pairs, and each pair was assigned 1 robot and 1 iPad
3. Each week, a group works with a different accessory
4. By the time the month is over, they have learned about coding and robotics and working together!

(This club was going on at the same time as the LEGO contest! You can see some of the projects on the shelf in the bottom left corner).

I’m going to go through the three accessories and outline what the goals and objectives are, along with some photos of the kiddos. I made up handouts for each accessory (below) so they could have some tangible instructions, with pictures of the code to help them out.

Launcher

I put this final picture in here because of the Styrofoam cup tower. One of the challenges was to make a tower and knock it over. After this group met that challenge, they decided to make a tower and put the bucket behind it, and try to launch the ball OVER the tower without knocking it over, and land it in the bucket. So creative!

Xylophone

Sketch Kit 

I highly recommend Dash to anyone who is robot shopping! Whether you are a librarian, teacher, or a parent, I think Dash will be able to really help your kiddos learn in a FUN way!

We did two robot clubs in the spring and we have another one scheduled for September. The kids really enjoyed it! I already have two kiddos who participated in the spring asking if they can do it again! Now that’s a compliment!