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Check out FIRST. If you're lucky a local high school or organization will already have a team that you could have them join. http://www.firstinspires.org/ htt

by Splines 11y ago

Check out FIRST. If you're lucky a local high school or organization will already have a team that you could have them join. http://www.firstinspires.org/ http://www.firstinspires.org/ It's a yearly competition and teams build a robot to compete. That robot is usually pretty big (3x3 ft. at the base, usually?). There's a kit of parts that includes a board, and the programming environment is mostly pre-configured for you. Next year's build season kicks off early January. The stuff these kids can build in a month is pretty amazing.

joelg236 11y ago
Seconded. I grew up doing the program and owe a lot to it. There's different levels for all ages.
presidentender 11y ago
I volunteer with our local FTC group - FTC is grades 7-12, FRC is 9-12. FIRST has really made our lives more difficult, paving the road to hell with good intentions by using android phones instead of microcontrollers, which required all new hardware of pretty poor quality and a Java software stack that some teams are finding difficult. Our local group has been farmed out around the state to provide support much more often than in years past. That said, FIRST is probably still the best organization for these kids to learn robotics, and I don't know whether FRC is going to suffer the same hardware and software hurdles as FTC.
Maultasche 11y ago
I was a mentor (mostly doing software) for a couple high schools, and I can also recommend this. Even as a mentor, I learned a lot from helping high school students program their robot. They provide a nice platform to get you started, but you still have to do a lot of thinking and clever engineering to get it all built. The teams I was with did welding and created parts on CNC machines, but that's not necessary. Many teams build their robots out of purchased pre-fabricated parts. That's a much better way of doing things when your team is new. You get the task the robot is supposed to perform and the rules it needs to follow in January, and you have to build a working robot in about six weeks. Everyone is very busy, and there's a lot of things that go wrong as the thing gets built. Everyone learns a lot from the experience.

by Splines 11y ago

joelg236 11y ago

Seconded. I grew up doing the program and owe a lot to it. There's different levels for all ages.

presidentender 11y ago

I volunteer with our local FTC group - FTC is grades 7-12, FRC is 9-12. FIRST has really made our lives more difficult, paving the road to hell with good intentions by using android phones instead of microcontrollers, which required all new hardware of pretty poor quality and a Java software stack that some teams are finding difficult. Our local group has been farmed out around the state to provide support much more often than in years past. That said, FIRST is probably still the best organization for these kids to learn robotics, and I don't know whether FRC is going to suffer the same hardware and software hurdles as FTC.

Maultasche 11y ago

I was a mentor (mostly doing software) for a couple high schools, and I can also recommend this. Even as a mentor, I learned a lot from helping high school students program their robot. They provide a nice platform to get you started, but you still have to do a lot of thinking and clever engineering to get it all built. The teams I was with did welding and created parts on CNC machines, but that's not necessary. Many teams build their robots out of purchased pre-fabricated parts. That's a much better way of doing things when your team is new. You get the task the robot is supposed to perform and the rules it needs to follow in January, and you have to build a working robot in about six weeks. Everyone is very busy, and there's a lot of things that go wrong as the thing gets built. Everyone learns a lot from the experience.