Building Robots in Pasco County Library
Today I got to attend a talk by Pasco County Library system at the Florida Library Association conference on how they are building robots in the library. They work with a non-profit called First that helps get kids excited in areas of STEM. Pasco is the only public library in the US doing this and has named their team Edgar Allan Ohms.
It’s important to not be scared of this. You don’t have to be an engineer to participate in this program, it’s about more than robot building. The students build these robots, compete with them and then can apply for scholarships through First. The students run the entire program. They build the website, design the logos and signs, build the robots, etc.
How did Pasco do this? They converted a space in their library to a makerspace with outlets, tools and even non-robotic tools like sewing machines and autoCAD tools. Of course they are trying to do this as cheaply and quickly as possible – this too teaches the kids on how to use ‘found’ items to make these things happen. Another skill they’re teaching the kids is out to sell themselves, how to fund-raise, and how to talk to people to get funding and promotion. It’s so much more than kids just sitting around playing games all day – they are learning real life skills.
How do librarians (with no engineering background) do this? You go out in to your community and find people who want to help out! They are using family members, community members, library fans, and local businesses to help provide tools, supplies and services. People know about First and so everyone wants to help. In some cases people will come to you and offer to help if they hear about what you’re doing. If you can’t find anyone yourself First will help you.
They start each August, and this year there are so many interested that they will be interviewing kids to find those who will commit. They attend workshops weekly and bi-weekly August through December to talk about the rules and plans. In January they go in to competition mode – this is when they start to build the robot. This video shows the rules that the team had to use last year in order to build their robot – this was shown to all teams at the exact same time and from then they spend the next 6 weeks building.
They need to start with some planning based on the rules in the video. The kids will start designing on CAD, testing it in modeling software online, and go from there to building something that will run.
Everything these groups are doing is open and shared. This means that the kids of learning job skills not just in engineering but marketing and writing and others. The groups that will be competing go out on scouting missions where they see what other groups have done and learn from them.
So, if you want to do this in your library how do you get funding and approval from your lawyers? First off explain that you will get some funding from the program itself. Next show that the this program is going to help the community members by offering scholarships to the kids, teaching them real skills and bringing the kids out into the community. Think about it this way – how much does a high school pay for a football team? For a fraction of that you can bring together 25 kids and teach them a skill for life whereas most of those kids who play football in high school don’t end up in the NFL. For the lawyers the library basically said that this is a valuable program and went to bat to get it to go through. In the end the lawyers wrote up a disclaimer that all the kids have to sign in order to participate.
This is the kind of program that more libraries should be offering to encourage kids to learn about STEM and bring library awareness to the entire community – our libraries are about so much more than books and DVDs and this is a great way to show that.
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