CROTHERSVILLE — In one area of the Crothersville Elementary School library, a boy and a girl carefully followed instructions to build a robot.
At another table, a boy and two girls were a little farther along and reached a point where they were using a controller to move their robot along the carpeted floor.
In another area, a boy had quite the robot built and was working on robotic arms so they could pick things up.
For these kids, robotics is fun and educational, and they feel fortunate school officials saw enough value in the program to get it started for the elementary and junior high levels.
“I’m really into things that make me think,” Langston Davis, 12, said as he worked on the robotic arms during a robotics camp last week. “Right now, I’ve gotten everything else to work. This, I’m trying to make it work and pick up these balls. It’s trial and error.”
Owen Ingham, who will be entering fifth grade in the fall, liked working alongside Ava Hodge on a robot.
“I’ve been building Legos since I was 3, and I love the fact how now, all of this is high-tech and it has motors and there are different things in the book how it has contraptions and stuff,” Ingham said.
Hodge said while it wasn’t easy figuring out how to assemble a robot, it’s fun, and she likes the teamwork involved.
The camp was offered to kids who just completed third, fourth, fifth or sixth grade, and 12 signed up for it.
Thanks to a $10,000 donation from Aisin Drivetrain Inc. in Crothersville, the camp was free, the kids received T-shirts and snacks and took a tour of the automotive parts maker to see robots in action and teachers Olivia Cain and Tiffany Orrill received a stipend for leading the camp.
Jackson County Industrial Development Corp. is covering the cost of VEX Robotics equipment for Crothersville, but since it won’t be in until October, elementary Principal Whitney Reinhart reached out to Shawn Mahoney with Seymour Community School Corp. about borrowing equipment for the camp.
“Shawn let us use everything of Seymour’s and provided all training for the two teachers and helped them make an agenda out daily, and he reaches out daily to see if he can help with anything,” Reinhart said. “He has just been wonderful. Robotics is definitely a collaborative effort in Jackson County.”
Since Crothersville was the only county school without robotics, Reinhart told Interim Superintendent Robert Hooker she would like to change that, and he helped make it happen.
“When he first came in, he sat with me and asked, ‘What’s one thing I can help you push in my short amount of time here?’ and I said, ‘Robotics,’ and just like that, we were up and running,” Reinhart said.
Crothersville had some students involved in robotics in the past, but the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in that going away for a few years, so this camp will help restart that.
“We were hoping that this camp would jump-start an interest for some of these kids so that it will continue in the school year at the elementary and the middle school level,” Reinhart said. “It’s another opportunity we can provide the kids. I think that’s what it’s all about is being able to provide more opportunities to kids, and this was a big one that we wanted to offer.”
During the camp, Reinhart went into the library at different points and watched as the kids worked on the robots.
“It’s amazing to watch because they have just taken off with it,” she said. “The teachers, it’s natural for them to want to give direction and tell them exactly how to do things, and in this case, the kids get to figure it out on their own, so it switches that role, and it has been fun to watch.”
Cain said when camp began, all of the pieces were in boxes for three robots. The kids had to follow each step in an instruction booklet to put them together and then figure out how to control and program them.
Before that, though, they did STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) projects the first week of camp to get their minds going.
Cain said they built a paper tower with just paper and tape and built an airplane out of paper that would fly the farthest distance, and those tasks were more difficult for the kids than assembling the robots.
“With the background that they have, I don’t know that they have the knowledge to be creative with a piece of paper, and most of them didn’t know how to fold a paper airplane. We had to show them how to make a paper airplane,” she said.
The first week, the kids also made an elevator out of cardboard, and Cain and Orrill asked them what the motor was in that situation and how an elevator would be considered a robot.
“Anything with a motor is a robot, so we talked about how aerodynamics help with having robots,” Cain said. “Basically, exploring all different kinds of fields that would create robots like this.”
Taking the field trip to Aisin on the last day of the first week of camp was beneficial as they prepared to dive into building robots the second week, she said.
“They got to see their real life robots working. They thought that was pretty cool,” she said.
Once the kids were building the robots, Cain said she felt like that was the most productive part of the camp because it related to STEM.
“We had kids that went to Aisin and said, ‘I think I want to do this for a job.’ I think some of the kids have found out that this is not necessarily for them, either,” she said. “But I think that it piques their interest.”
For example, she said Davis put a robot together by following the instructions, and he also made up things in his head and gave them a try.
“Langston will be interested in this the rest of his life just because he is very into the technology and the robots and all that kind of stuff,” Cain said. “It gives them a different way to use technology that’s not a computer screen or a TV, and they actually have to make it work because this is like a next level step up from Legos.”
Cain liked seeing the kids succeed during the assembly process.
“It’s very exciting to see them so excited that they got something to work on their own,” she said. “I’m very mathematically inclined and I love science and STEM, and that’s why I teach fifth grade because that’s the good part of fifth grade. This is something I’ve never done before. I’ve never built robots before, I don’t know how these parts work, but I can follow a book just like they can, and honestly, they’ve done a good job of doing it by themselves.”
The next step is for the kids to take what they learned at camp and participate in robotics competitions starting in the 2022-23 school year.
“Our ultimate goal was to get them familiar with all of these parts, knowing how they are now, and in the fall time, we plan on having an elementary robotics and a middle school robotics team,” Cain said. “We’re hoping that getting these kids back interested will pull more of the other kids back into an activity like this.”
Like Reinhart said, it’s about giving students more options.
“We’re trying to bring a lot of new stuff to Crothersville,” Cain said. “We’re trying to get them interested in a lot of different things. This is a different kind of competition than a Math Bowl or a Spell Bowl competition. It does involve your brain, but it involves a different portion of your brain.”