Robot Doodles: Outreach with a Personal Touch

For me programming has never been easy.  In many ways, I've felt as if I'm fighting an invisible force that prevents me from understanding the problem that I must confront in the code.  At times I've seen the problem incorrectly, or missed a key aspect of the problem.  Other times, I've sought to unfold layers of complication into a step-by-step process, only to realize that the problem can only be solved by seeing the entire process at once, or--even more curiously--by willfully ignoring the gritty details altogether.  Amid the many bugs and compiler errors, it's often difficult to realize the fulfillment of writing software; I can sometimes lose that first flare that brought me to find a passion to program in the first place.  But, at the end of the day, when the code compiles and our robot buzzes to life with a new task, I can sense that first flare of inspiration erupt into a cackling fire.

Today, armed with a collection of Scribblers, we, the ICEX team, sought to bring that inspiration to a collection of Sicilian elementary school students.  Scribblers are tiny robots that can trace their paths with a permanent marker. With these 'bots, we beckoned small groups of school children to join us and create a path for the robot to follow.  To bring them closer to programming, we gave them a collection of color-coded cards, each with a discrete action that the robot could take: forward, small-left turn, big-left turn, backwards, and others.  Their task?  Create the geometric shapes from the robot path by laying down the instructions of the robot on the paper.  After they had placed the instructions before us, we programmed the robot with their list, and set the Scribbler on their path of choice.  In this manner, we've given them the first chance to program, to give requests and have a robot execute these tasks of our carefully-chosen requests.

I cannot speak Italian; neither can I speak Sicilian, and at first the language barrier was abrupt. I couldn't answer their questions with my own words.  Nice try, Joshua, but even your high-school Spanish is going to help you here.  With a marker and good gesture, though, we each had our collection of students programming their bots with shapes of their will.  In the end, so many of the children's faces were alive with the thrill of the robot.  And in the end, hopefully, we lit one or two flares of inspiration within them--that same flare that will carry them through their future programming bugs too.