A group of my students worked on robotics this semester. As their final project, they had to design an obstacle course, build it, and program the robot to navigate it. Their course was dubbed “City of Destruction” because of the resemblance.

The students are Ben in the 9th grade, Gavi in the 6th grade, and Jake in the 6th grade. Here’s the video I made of their last day in class:

I am incredibly proud of the work these students did. They had to work as a team because we had only one Boe-Bot robot and one obstacle course. For the final project, each student wrote one section of the programming and tested it independently. One student was in charge of assembling the code into one program that ran seamlessly.

The robotics kids were part of a general tech class I taught this spring. Students ranged from 6th to 11th grades and represented a wide range of interests. I decided to allow the kids to study a tech subject of their choosing. One kid chose JavaScript, two others chose music production, and so on. I was there to provide project management guidance and the equipment. The kids needed to be motivated and independent. My robotics group built the robot on their own and set about learning to program it.

The class was always hectic. I felt pulled by every group constantly. However, I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. The end result reflects the class really well: the music track in the robotics video was composed and played by another student in class, Patrick (who also plays in a band called Reminisce).