Week number: 5
Hi again, dear readers!
How’s your week been so far? Ours has been filled with assignments, quizzes, and the like, but we’re still managing. Hopefully you’re all having fantastic weeks.
We just wanted to explicitly clarify what exactly it is that we’re working on. The point of our project is to design projects (using robotics) that teach grade school children the fundamentals of robotics and allow them to build their own projects.
Two weeks ago in class, which was February 6th, we were asked to begin the actions of Phase 1 in the CCB Workbook. For those of us who don’t what what this is, let’s go on a quick commercial break while we insert below a brief summary of the entire CCB process.
Some facts about the CCB Workbook
- CCB = Creative Capacity Building
- Outlines the various steps needed to follow the design approach used at MIT’s D-Lab [fun fact: one of our lecturers, Dr. Heather Beem, is a proud MIT alum]
- Assures us of the fact that we will come up with better solutions and better products by the time we’re done using it
- The workbook PDF can be found by clicking on the word here!
Now that we’re back, we hope you at least have a fair idea of what the CCB Design Workbook is. As we were saying earlier, we were tasked with beginning (and completing) Phase 1. For those of you who actually followed the link and went to the PDF (bless your hearts), you would have noticed that Phase 1 is titled Information. Essentially, this phase is to help us find out as much information as possible before we just start designing. Not gathering information before we start building is akin to building a house without a building or architectural plan — there’s going to be a lot of confusion.
As we started this phase, we spoke with Benedict and tried to get as much information as we could. We also looked at things that are similar and exist already, in order to find out what we could do to make our solution unique. While we don’t want to give away too much information, we would also like you to know some of the key things that we found out, as well as a couple of challenges we encountered along the way.
Challenges
- One major challenge is that our solution isn’t a product in the strictest sense. It’s more of a tutorial than a tangible product, even though we will be building projects and writing tutorials about them. However, we spoke to our other lecturer, Rose Dodd, and she provided us with invaluable advice!
- Another challenge is finding time when we’re all free to meet. However, since we’re all engineering students, we’re just looking for common free times in our schedules so that we can do this project to the best of our ability.
Key Things
- Related technologies include, but are not limited to,
- AWS DeepRacer (note: while this is not strictly geared towards grade school children, it’s still a way to teach people how to program and build their own projects)
- Modular Robotics (note: they make robotics kits for children, our target market)
- Wizbots (note: this is a robotics-based design lab for children between the ages of 7 and 14, with summer camp & after-school programs)
- What can we draw inspiration from?
- AWS DeepRacer, in that we can think of ways to simulate the building process for our users
- LEGO Mindstorms, especially since their tutorials and guides are simple and easy to follow
- Some questions we have
- How exactly do children in our target group learn? What are their attention spans? Why would they choose our tutorials over watching cartoons or playing video games?
- What is the best way to design a tutorial for building robotics projects? Should we use cartoons? Should it be a comic book vibe? How exactly would we have simple and easy-to-understand English?
We hope you’ve learned something new, and that you have a fair idea of our journey. Please feel free to leave comments with suggestions, ideas, etc.
Signing out,
ToRoCa 