Mentoring a Young Persons Team

Mentoring young persons in PiWars has by far been the most rewarding aspect of the competition over the past 5 years. This year is the 7th young persons team I have mentored through the competition. They have pretty much taken up all my time for robotics during this competition so far, hence the lack of progress and updates on my own robot. Time is always very limited with young persons teams. In the past I have always mentored through running after school robotics clubs in local schools. School safe guarding rules generally mean I only get a hour a week with the teams, and have no way to communicate with them outside of these club sessions. This really restricts what I can do with them. I literally get around 20 hours with them over the entire span of the competition, to help them design, build and code a robot. The exception to this has been the monthly Robot Club run by Brian Corteil at Cambridge Makespace, where I have managed to arrange with the parents of some of the children in my teams to bring their children along and give us some more precious time to work on their robots.

This year is a little different as I was unable to get an after school club organised due to staff leaving and schools closing/merging where I had previously made contacts with staff. But then my daughter entered with a school friend giving me a team to mentor who I could work with outside of school. This has made a huge difference both in terms of what we can do, and in how much of my time they have taken up!

Here they are at Makespace where we went to the Robot Club and built this robot in a day!

It was based on the guts of a robot from last year (my daughter was also on that team). We designed and laser cut a base plate with holes to mount all the electronics and batteries, then mounted everything with machine screws. This is just a working development platform to give them something to start working on the code. We looked at my collection of sensor electronics, and they decided to start with a camera as they plan to try and tackle some of the challenges autonomously. This brings me to the second huge benefit of mentoring young people. They teach you so much! I have never done any image recognition before. I always wanted to explore this area, but never found the time until now. Suddenly I am up to my neck in their Open CV code, trying to understand it, help them debug it and advising them on approaches to problem solving. They have some great ideas, slicing images into vertical strips, calculating average brightness to determine where in the frame the line is for the line following for the Lava Palava challenge. Detecting barrels by colour, and recognising Zombies. Even if I never get the time to work on my own robot for this competition, they have pushed my knowledge far into new areas. It has been great!