ARS FIRST Robotics Team creates "Scrappy Circuit" kits

Taylor Lane, The News Courier, Athens, Ala.
·2 min read

Jul. 26—When Taylor Whisenant attended the International Society for Technology in Education conference in New Orleans this summer, she was exposed to the idea of creating "scrappy circuit" kits as a method of STEAM outreach.

Since then, the Athens Renaissance FIRST Robotics team has been hard at work compiling these kits to hand out to local students.

"I got to go to a conference this summer called ISTE. It's basically a big science and technology education conference. It's kind of like a bucket list sort of thing for a lot of teachers. It's a big deal. It was at New Orleans this year, and I won a grant from the State Department of Education. ... I got to go to this conference, and one of the sessions I went to this guy, Michael Carroll, a teacher in Pennsylvania, he developed this whole idea of scrappy circuits and had a session on it. He has a book and I'm sitting in the session and like, we got to build some and play with them a bit, and I was like, 'oh, this would be such a cool cost-effective way to do some STEM outreach,'" said Whisenant.

The kit allows students to use inexpensive household items to create mini circuits.

"So, the whole idea really is just that you can take some very basic, cheap items and just develop little mini circuits," said Whisenant. "We put in batteries, LEDs cardboard squares, binder clips, and paper clips, just little cheap things like that."

Whisenant's goal is to distribute the free kits around Athens for young students to have access to.

"We started with making 40 of these kits and they cost, like, $2.79 a piece to make the way that we made them, and we're going to just find different ways to distribute them. The team is going to be at LCCI packing food bags. So, we're going to take a few and see if they would hold on to them and give them out to families that maybe had some kids," said Whisenant.

The team is looking for local sponsors to support the creation of more kits for distribution.

"We're going to start with this first set of 40 and then we're going to see if maybe there are any local sponsors that would want to sponsor us making some more of these to give out," said Whisenant.

This new project is part of a larger effort for the team to have an impact on the community surrounding them.

"FIRST, the organization that our team is through, a big part of the awards you can win are impact awards or engineering inspiration award. The organization and the competition pushes and emphasizes community engagement, STEM outreach, and helping others more than just building a robot," said Whisenant.