Code Red’s Robotics Summer Camp Gets Kids Excited About STEM

As is Code Red’s practice each summer, we offered a week long summer camp for elementary students once again in June 2018.  For the last three years, Code Red’s summer camp has been based on our NRG (Next Robotics Generation) program, a 1:1 student to robot competitive robotics program designed for students working with a parent or guardian to build, modify, and compete with their own Arduino robot.  At the end of the session, students keep their robots.  We offer two different programs, one for first time students, and one for repeating students.

For each day of camp, we started the session with team building activities, problem-solving games, and engineering challenges.  After that, first year students went about building and modifying their own robots throughout the week to prepare for playing our 2017 game, Pyramid Puzzle.  Repeating students had separate sessions that taught programming basics for the robots they already had from their first years.  During the week, these students learned how to program their robots to autonomously follow a line around a course. At the end of the week, Code Red FRC students ran a tournament where all the students competed with their robots.  It was a fun day filled with qualification matches, a final tournament, an award ceremony (for winners of the tournament and judged awards), and a potluck.