Getting to Know the Robotics Club

Have you ever been interested in building a robot? What about making a website or creating your own video game? Last year, a group of students came together and created the Robotics Club. Within a year, the group of eleven students have created and programmed many products, including machines, websites, and video games. Their prized creation, the Rubik’s Cube solver, was built by the whole club in a joint effort. It is designed to scan each face of the cube, insert data into a coded algorithm which processes the information and finds a solution. After that, it moves the Rubik’s Cube with the combined effort of its tray and claw to rotate each side until they are all correctly solved. The coding was created by Michael Ott while the rest of the club put the robot together.

Besides the code, Michael also makes video games. He likes video games because he enjoys playing them and loves the challenge of making codes. To make a game, one must first come up with an idea, add code and tweak it until the game is perfected. Michael’s latest creation is Taco Tapper. The simple game involves clicking a taco with your computer mouse as many times as possible and “purchasing” upgrades with the clicked tacos.

You can see the rest of the Robotics Club’s products on their website. The website itself was made by club member David O’Brien with Dream Weaver. Dream Weaver is a program which enables the user to insert code on half of the screen and displays what the website will look like on the other half. David likes using this particular program because it is easy to keep track of finished work. He built the Robotic’s Club website in two weeks, taking one week to create the code and another to finalize appearances.

The club will be holding a robotics fair on April 5. The fair will be run by members that will lead different workshops, including making an MOD for Minecraft, coding and writing a website in Dreamweaver, learning how to build your own computer and also competing in a special robot competition. The robot competition will be an event where one robot draws a line on the floor, and a second robot reads the line and follows it along the ground.

Everyone is encouraged to come to the fair to participate in the workshops and activities and hopefully learn something new. Visit http://robotics.cces.org to stay up-to-date about what the Robotics Club is doing!

[Corrected January 22: This article has updated to include the proper date of the robotics fair, April 5, which a previous article said was April 14. The club’s URL has also been included.]