Covid-19 and Return-to-School (2)

Today, I spent an hour with a health and safety expert, the principal and vice-principal and assorted others. They had a look at the robotics lab which is divided into two areas: a classroom area with 9 student tables and a lab area with various work benches, table saw, chop saw, drill press and band saw, and storage areas. I’m impressed by the degree of caring and interest at balancing the needs of students to learn with the safety of everyone in the learning community.

In the first quadmester, one class of 8 students (one per table) will be working their way through grade 11 academic math with me as their teacher.

I hope that there will be opportunity for some of the grade 11/12 students to assist with the assembly, set-up and testing of: the CNC router; and, the 3D printer.

Perhaps we can also make some first-quad progress on robot design.

One idea that seems do-able, is to use a telescoping climbing device rather than an articulating arm. A clever idea (described on the Chief Delphi web site) is to use a tape measure or a drain-clearing snake (each is essentially a length of coiled spring steel) to push up the telescoping climber then to pull down the telescoping climber thereby lifting the robot.