Kathy Mosler from Paradise Robotics enlisted a group of 4th graders from the Extended Self-Contained Elementary School, Illinois, for helping in building of robots for customer demonstrations.
Kathy gathered together some of the interested students and their parents to get involved in the activity. These students were the top 2% from the schools of the district; they were made to go through some tests for evaluating their potential before being inducted into the program. Mosler was the coach for these students and together they built a number of robots and also learnt their programming and graphical programming interface concepts.
Some of the projects that the team built were, a fan having a light, a freight elevator and a line following robot. For controlling the freight elevator and the line following robots, the students tried out sample programs that were part of the kit. For the fan with light project the students were asked to come up with their own programs. A local online newspaper was invited to witness the final building session and they in turn produced a good article and shot impressive videos of the event.
Paradise Robotics has recently been involved in educational activities by offering new educational lines for schools, hobbyists and Universities. These are essentially educational robot kits from Vex Robotics and Fischer Technik. The projects that the students came up with used the RoboTX Training Lab provided by Fischer Technik. Paradise Robotics plans to conduct another robot building exercise by using the Vex Robotics kit in the future with a different set of students.
Source: http://www.paradiserobotics.com