IgniteCS
Tides Foundation
Google Education and University Relations Fund
Award Date: 02/01/2015 | Award Amount: $5,000 | Effective Dates: 2/27/15 – 2/26/16
Project Personnel: Nicholas Webb (Computer Science)
Project Summary: With the help from a grant through the Tides Foundation’s Google Education and University Relations Fund, members of the Association for Computing Machinery Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W) at Union College will run the IgniteCS after school program for middle school students through the Kenney Community Center. This program will meet once a week for 8 weeks during our 10 week trimester, for a total for 8 sessions. If successful, the program will continue twice a week for 10 weeks during the summer. With the equipment provided by this grant, ACM-W will also continue the NCWIT Social Robotics Workshop that is already in place between Union College and SUNY Albany under the advisement of Nick Webb (Union) and Jennifer Goodall (SUNY). The ACM-W members will teach the students how to build and program a NXT EV3 Lego Robot over the course of the program. These robots have motor control, UV sensors, audio output, and touch sensors. The goal is to have the students develop a personality for their robots over the course of the program, the last step being robot speech. Success will be measured by having a robot challenge during the last session of the program. For example, we would ask students to collaborate in building a Rube Goldberg machine using their programming skills they have learned, the robots themselves, and Legos from the NXT robot kits.