In 2020, SFE grantee NYC FIRST faced a challenge experienced during the pandemic by most organizations that provide direct services to students and young learners: how to translate highly nuanced, experiential educational programming to a remote context.
NYC FIRST is an organization that provides in-person programming, through its own robotics classrooms, in-school and out of school programs, and camps that are predicated on hands-on learning, interaction and exchange among team leaders, teachers, and peers, and friendly competition between teams. The organization’s work bridges the digital and physical worlds, and is designed to help students apply robotics-driven systems thinking and design skills to real world situations. This philosophy is most clearly distilled in the organization’s STEM Centers, which are maker spaces and educational robotics labs in the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library as well as a flagship location at Cornell Tech. But without access to these gathering places during the pandemic, how could NYC FIRST replicate the experience of its in-person summer camps and after school programming?
The solution lay in developing a way to deliver the maker space experience directly to students. Enter, Robot in a Box™, which included an ultra-low cost computer, prototyping materials, and robotics activities that high school and middle school students could use to experience the STEM Center fundamentals from home. Each Robot in a Box kit contains a motor, chassis, wheels, power circulatory system, and a micro:Bit controller. Students are taught to make five different robots, but the materials can also be combined to make whatever type of robot a kid can imagine.
