There were robots upon robots at CSUN last summer, when students from three Valley middle schools met up with members of the CSUN Matabots, the university’s cross-disciplinary VEX robotics club.
It all started during a regular meeting of the robotics club, when Dale Conner, the club’s advisor, and Mike Rivas, a representative of CSUN’s Summer Academic Enrichment Program, came in to say that Project GRAD Los Angeles, a nonprofit dedicated to working with students and families to promote college success, was looking for people to teach robotics to middle school students. A few days later, a Project GRAD representative met with club members and briefed them on the program and its goals.
From there, the CSUN Matabots, consisting of computer engineering, mechanical engineering and accounting majors, put together a lesson plan for the program; they also created a game that would put the robots through their paces, yet be simple enough so that the middle school students could build competitive robots and have fun in the process.
“We were pretty excited to teach them,” says Edwyn Jocol, the club’s secretary and a computer engineering major.
During the summer two cohorts of 30 Project GRAD students went through the two-week program. The first week, they learned basic principles of robotics and design, and during the second, teams of five students built robots from VEX kits.
“Some of their designs were pretty creative,” Jocol says. “Through the kids we discovered different ways to use some of the parts that we honestly hadn’t imagined. They used some of the parts in a unique way.”
The last day of the program, the teams competed against one another in the game the CSUN students had devised. Afterward, some of the students reported to Project GRAD staff that they were considering careers in engineering.
Now that the VEX club members have some focused mentoring and teaching under their belts, they may be on the verge of expanding their outreach. Six schools are interested in having the CSUN students mentor their students.
“Aside from having a passion for robots, we also like to give back to the community,” Jocol says.