Paradise Robotics Builds Robots with 9 Year Old Gifted Students

Barrington, IL, August 28, 2011 --(PR.com)-- Summer is a perfect time for kids to attend camp and there are many Summer Camp opportunities. Paradise Robotics does not currently host Summer camps, however a need arose to build a robot for customer demonstrations. Instead of making it an internal activity, Kathy Moseler decided to enlist some local 4th grade students from Illinois School District 220’s Extended Self-Contained Elementary School program to assist.

“My son was interested and I knew some of his friends would be interested, so I spoke with their parents and we started meeting once a week over the summer,” Moseler said.

Students enrolled in District 220’s Extended Self-Contained program are amongst the top 2% of elementary students in the district. Students are tested and evaluated before being invited into the program. Needless to say, the students Moseler recruited are in a class by themselves (pun intended).

The team, with Moseler as the coach, built a series of robots and also learned how to program them with a graphical programming interface. The very capable students did the majority of the hands-on work, while Moseler provided guidance and advice.

Three projects were built: a freight elevator, a fan with a light and a line following robot. Sample control programs were used to control the freight elevator and line following robots. The sample programs were included in the kit. Each child wrote their own program to control the fan and light. When asked how he liked the activity, participant Kyle exclaimed, ”It was awesome!”

“The biggest challenge was the line follower. There were a lot of pieces and many of them were very small. They had to fit together just right,” Moseler said. The line following robot took four weeks to build.

“We invited our local online newspaper, Barrington Patch, to attend the final building session of the Summer. They did an excellent story and made a nice video about our activity,” Moseler added. The Barrington Patch video shows how the activity not only enriched Paradise Robotics by providing a new demonstration robot. It also greatly excited and enriched the four 4th graders who participated.

Paradise Robotics recently decided to expand its robotics offerings by including two new educational lines for schools, Universities and hobbyists. The lines are educational robot kits from Fischer Technik and Vex Robotics. All of the projects built during this summer used the Fischer Technik RoboTX Training Lab. A future robot building activity is being planned that will use Vex Robotics educational kit. A different team of students will be recruited for the Vex Robotics robot building activity.

Paradise Robotics has been in business since 2006, focusing on retail sales of consumer robots such as robot vacuum cleaners, robotic lawn mowers, educational robot kits for children and robot toys. Sales occur locally in Barrington, IL and worldwide via the online store. Educational Robot Kits for Institutions is Paradise Robotics’ newest offering.

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