Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.24.11 | I was lucky enough to spend a recent Sunday at the East Bay Mini Maker Faire with two 5-year-olds. Like the larger maker events we’ve written about, this was the East Bay’s version of the DIY science fair started by Make Magazine. It attracted everyone from techies to foodies, hosted on the gorgeous campus of the Park Day School in Oakland.

In less than two hours, we added blocks to a life-sized Lego car, churned our own butter, shot a bow and arrow, played a piano made out of conductive paper sensors, threw a clay pot, crafted our very own rocket made from masking tape and shot it into the air about 25 times while yelling “launch!” at the top of our lungs. Not bad for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

But the favorite activity without a doubt for the kids (and this grownup) was driving Rubi the robot developed by Team Antipodes, the all-girls robotics team from Pacifica, Calif.

Using remote controls, my son and his friend, and lots of other kids, got a chance to drive Rubi, who made her debut at the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition, around a field while attempting to duplicate some of the competition’s challenges, such as balancing Rubi on a teeter-totter-like bridge.

The FIRST Robotics competitions are exhilarating events—watch this Spotlight video about the Chicago Knights team. And we’ve also explored in numerous posts efforts to encourage girls to enter STEM fields (see Christine’s recent look at state and federal STEM initiatives). 

But meeting this team of girls, and watching them teach younger kids how to drive this robot they built from scratch, and listening to them answer questions about the programming and electrical engineering skills they learned along the way, just may be the most powerful example yet of STEM learning at its best and what the Maker Faire is all about. Not to mention their achievements are also a great example of interest-driven, out-of-the classroom learning. 

Team Antipodes came together to compete in the First Lego League Robotics competition in 2009, placing third in regional championships. Since then, they’ve traveled all over the world, competing in robotics competitions in Istanbul, Turkey and Tasmania, where they picked up a new team member.

They competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) last year, winning the Colorado State Championships, and competed in the FTC World Championships in St. Louis.

The girls have placed an emphasis on collaboration and mentoring – working with similar teams from around the globe and sharing their skills with younger robotics teams. Check out their list of essential tools for aspiring robot makers here.

A glance at the team’s website reveals these girls have twice demo’d their robot at Google’s campus in Mountain View as part of Google’s Tech Talk series, also sharing their research project on magnetic levitation train systems.

Their advice to aspiring makers? “Don’t let other people hold you down,” Violet Replicon, one of the team members, said in a Q&A at Geek Feminism last year. “Your friends may tell you that you are wasting your time, or someone may tell you that you can’t do it. You have to learn to not listen to these people.”

Watch them go in this video: