Over five years I started a volunteer opportunity with the robotics team at our local high school. They already had a mechanical engineer mentor and were looking for a programming mentor. My wife, a math teacher at the school, recommended me and I was only too happy to help.
First Robotics is a STEM program designed to give kids hands-on experience in building and programming robots. They offer four levels of competition: FIRST Lego League Jr, FIRST Lego League, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition. My daughter is in FIRST Lego League Jr, which is more about building themed scenes with some automation. The Lego League uses the Lego robotics kits to build robots and compete in challenges. The FIRST Tech Challenge builds robots from scratch with an Android Phone as the brain of the robot. The FIRST Robotics Challenge takes everything up a notch with bigger robots and bigger fields.
I personally volunteer in the 3rd tier, FIRST Tech Challenge which is an affordable option for smaller schools. The robots must fit within an 18-inch cube and compete on a 12' by 12' field. Every year the competition is different. See here for this year's competition. They used to use Lego NXT bricks for the brains of the bot running a RobotC programming language, but now they have switched to Android phones that are programmed using Java. They use two phones, one on the robot, and one for the driver station. Each team can have two drivers, using controllers connected to the driver station phone, and one coach. There is a 30-second autonomous phase, where the robotic can only run on programmed logic and then a two-minute driver operated phase.
The students often have very little experience programming, so they can certainly use a mentor who can help them design and implement their code. I've found that they often need the most help with the initial planning process and debugging their code if something goes wrong. Other students may come in with no programming experience, but a desire to learn.
So if you have an interested in encouraging young minds who are already excited about trying a little programming, I would see if a local high school need a little help on their robotics team!
Images from https://www.firstinspires.org.
I'm a FIRST alum from FRC team 234. I just made a post about the 2018 FRC game. When I did a search for "FIRST Robotics", this post came up. I'm kind of surprised there aren't more FIRSTers on here.
FRC Team 223 Veteran here!
FRC was what got me into programming originally - and college too ;)
Oh fun. I’ll bet there are more than a few robotics alums hanging around Steemit.
Just posted about FIRST! Glad to see another volunteer on here :)