MPS students of all grades to have the opportunity to participate in robotics programs
A group of Montgomery middle school teachers are gathered around a robotics game board in the old Booker T. Washington building. On the ground are robots, and these teachers are experimenting with the technology so they can soon guide students to build their own.
The middle school teachers are robotics coaches for their schools, some of which are getting robotics programs for the first time. The game this year: Get the robots to score by launching discs to the other side of the goal in an almost shuffleboard fashion.
One of the robots, made by kids at the summer camp, has a conveyer belt function that picks up discs and loads them into the back of the robot. But the conveyer belt is malfunctioning, forcing the discs to get stuck in the rubber lip under the robot, so the teachers just pick them up and load them by hand.
Then, a button on the remote shoots them out from the other side of the robot.
Christopher Hull, a teacher at Baldwin Arts and Academic Magnet and second-year robotics coach, messes with the robot, manually reloading the pieces. He accidentally shoots himself in the foot with one of the orange discs. He jokes that his previous tech experience came from coding his MySpace profile.
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He says his students last year developed an identity from their time with robotics. They became a team and named their inventions. One of the robots was named “Jarvis,” after the robot butler from the Avengers.
The teachers look ready for a school day of their own as the training begins on this Thursday morning: large sodas and coffees sit on the desks with their binders, pens and pencils. Now, they are sitting on the floor, messing with the pieces.
Kristy Hatch, a science specialist at MPS, says this will be the first year that the program will be extended to all of the schools. It began with a Hyundai grant to put robotics in middle school, although Brew Tech and LAMP already had teams. Now, she’s looking into a way for students to participate in drone soccer.
"That's my next big vision for the program,” she says. “And, I think it's completely doable.”
Vanity Martin is another second-year robotics coach. She teaches at Brewbaker Middle and explains how excited her students were to advance to the Alabama State VEX IQ championship. She calls it a “miracle.”
"You could really say we were kind of like underdogs in a sense,” she says. “Myself and our other coach, we had minimal robotics experience. And, several of our students had no robotics experience at all. So, just being able to compete with such great teams — and several already having years of experience — so to come in and place... we were just so excited.”
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They worked on the robot design for four months, she says.
The kids are very passionate about the program, and it helps them come out of their shells for other courses, too, Hull says.
“So, they're learning a lot about attention to detail with these robots, but I learned how much the kids are passionate about it,” Hull says.
Hatch says the program is important because it teaches students how to fail successfully. The robot code will not always be correct the first time — and the students have to learn to fail and try again.
"So, it's really the kids learn from each other, they learn teamwork; again, the biggest one, they learned how to fail,” Hatch says.
Jemma Stephenson is the children and education reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at jstephenson@gannett.com or 334-261-1569.
This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: Montgomery Public Schools rolling out robotics programs this year
