Charlotte Area Robotics is a student run and funded club that participates in the ieee Southeast Conference hardware competition. Each year we design, build, and test an fully autonomous robot to compete against other universities.
- Educating the Community -
Each year the UNC Charlotte Robotics club organizes and runs a robotics workshop on the campus of UNC Charlotte as a part of the NC Science Festival. Over the last three years, this has grown from one day with 60 children and 60 adults participating for two days with 120 children and 120 parents participating. During the workshop, child/parent pairs learn about LEGO Mindstorm robot kits and programming and create an autonomous vehicle that competes in a “Sumo Wrestling” contest. Twenty club members volunteer their time each day to run the workshop. It is consistently lauded by attendees.
Because of the popularity that this event has gained over the previous years, local sponsors requested that the workshop is expanded to include more days and accommodate more children and parents. This past year, the workshop reached over 100 kids and parents each day over four days. In total the event reached over 450 people from the community, getting them interested in robotics and the entire STEM field. The club is planning on extending the number of days that the workshop is held to increase the population of people reached.
This year, the club plans to visit different K-12 public schools of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to teach students how to program. The students will be taught block-based and/or text-based programming, depending on their grade levels. To promote STEM for students, without having to wait for the workshop, going to the schools to teach programming will be another way to reach out to students.
In addition, a few members of the club have reached out to the freshman learning community for engineering students, and a few non-engineer majors, to teach the students to use computer aided design (CAD) softwares and how to 3D-print their designs. The freshmen majoring in mechanical engineering eventually learn how to manipulate objects with different types of software, but the other majors do not. The workshops provided for the students allow for everyone to learn how to create their own drawings no matter what their major is.
