Axelys Cabrera was born on July 29, 2008, Dominican Republic. She studied in various schools until sixth grade, but now she hopes to finish her studies at her current educational institution, Cathedral International School.
She is in ninth grade and what she likes most about school is the possibility of expanding students' capacity and the development of their talents through unusual activities outside of the traditional education system.
All her life she has been in contact with technology. Ever since she was little, she loved playing video games on the only computer in her house. She loved watching videos and, to the best of her ability at that time, being self-taught. She used and uses technology to expand her knowledge and as a tool for multiple tasks.
Currently, she uses technology as the main source of study and as a means to entertain herself in her free time. But, she hopes to improve a lot in this and at the end of the school year have the knowledge and capacity to make her own video games and social apps that can be interesting for a large audience. Also, even though she still doesn't know what career she wants to do, she sees this opportunity to learn about robotics and technology as great since they are part of our present and future and they will help her in her daily life and whatever she wants to do when she grows up.
Between 2017 and 2018, she did two summer workshops at the Amaury Sanchez Artistic Training Academy (AFA) and played extra roles in films produced in the country. She took all acting etiquette courses at Dominican Beauty Academy (DBA) and, also, participated in the annual reign of the Academy of Santiago de los Caballeros, Agnes Models.
Since she likes to sing, she was a soprano singer at the Dominican National Children's Choir from April 2016 to September 2022, but, in the present, she is looking for new things and experiences.
In fact, her hobby is reading, most of them non-fiction and epic fantasy books. She likes holidays, being with family, and spending quality time with friends. Although she doesn't know too much, she loves to paint, is creative, and has a fascination with writing and expressing her feelings through words.
She wants to be someone that makes a difference so, that is why she strives every day to have a better future and be a better person. Her strengths are her dedication, fellowship and her gratitude. Her biggest weakness is that she doesn't know when to say "no", and that is the reason why she often overloads herself with responsibilities and tasks that, sometimes, do not correspond to her. Although, she is already working on all of the above mentioned and she is learning to set limits, so that do not consume her day by day and do not affect her efficiency either.
The team was made on August 30, 2022, the date on which a group of people was signing a ''contract'' of collaboration and camaraderie that would last an entire school year, or even more, nobody knows. The name is the set of initials of the names of each member of the group; Kathy (K), Axelys (A), Yuliana (Y), Sidney (S) and Manuela (M). Except the initial of Onely Santos, who integrated into the team days after, on September 9.
Together, they created ingenious models and programations in the most used programmation website in their school, Tinkercad. In addition, this team, despite their differences, help each other and work for the common good, looking for success and improvement on the way.
This was the first project; a city model. In this work was necessary to have at least four houses, seven buildings, two streets, and one car.
On the other hand, was also necessary some extra buildings and structures. In this case, there is a school, a supermarket, a park, a basketball court, and little people.
Each member of the team was in charge of creating a part of this city, in this way they could finish in less time and more skillfully. They worked together to complete the final details and helped each other and asked any questions they had about it. To do this, in Tinkercad they used various geometric figures, such as rectangles, squares, circles, cones, isosceles, semi-ovals, among others. They also used pre-made figures, such as the palms, and used various tools to be able to mold what they had planned in their heads.
Axelys Cabrera likes the result of this work. She thinks is incredible how teamwork can do great things, and this project, despite the difficulties, is one of them. KAYSM's city is, based on Axelys' opinion, completed in all required areas, creative, varied, and full of colors. This model helped as an introduction to better creating real-world representations and organizing us as a whole group.
The second project was individual and consisted of each group having a singular object to design, and KAYSM TECH had to recreate a bike.
Axelys' bike has a characteristic structure bit based on old bicycles. Its good-looking color magenta is intended to attract the attention of the public and be interested.
In this case, Axelys worked alone and exploited her imagination as much as possible to carry out this work. She used basic figures, such as circles, ovals and semi circles, and other figures, to give it the desired shape. She used tools such as grouping objects, copying and pasting, inverting adjusting sizes, among others, to be able to complete what was required in class.
Her point of view is that this was a challenge because she never did something similar before. However, the final product doesn't disappoint her. Axelys' took this activity to better understand what design really is. Also, she learned some tactics when working on it and how much it costs to do something that, for many, is "simple".
This is the third and last work. It was also individual and consisted of each group having a specific figure to program particular movements. KAYSM had to do this project with a star.
She put a single star, changes the color to personalize it, and then edit the following mentioned; each figure needed to travel through all the squares of the model, and, for this, it was necessary to manipulate the "x", "y" and "z" axes of, in this case, the star. Also, to have a sequence of coordinated movements, she rotated the figure in certain degrees, many times it was negative ninety degrees and then this amount but positive, in this way the figure gave the turns she wanted and everything looked more orderly.
This was the hardest one because she has never programmed in her life. To her, it took a lot of time and effort, but now she admires how all the battles she passes through are worth it. She hopes to keep learning about technology as she just did until now and improve herself in this area that is very important in the present and will reign in the future.
They worked on a presentation about this platform and talked about what it consists of. This time, they were explaining how Scratch works, its origin, creator, functions, objectives, benefits and much more about the site. Scratch is a platform for kids and teens to learn more about the programming language in a simple and fun way. And this platform is an excellent tool for them to develop their mental skills by putting into practice their imagination, creativity and agility to create, and all through this page that uses a very clear visual language so that everyone can use it regardless of whether they have previous knowledge or not.
Thanks to this presentation Axelys had to investigate Scratch with her partners and therefore learned an enormous amount of ways programmers can create a videogame or an animated story, she understood better the tools that are needed at the time of coding, and also a little bit of the language itself.
Running Robots is the name of their first game naked on Scratch. The game was created with the idea of making it easy for a young audience to understand the dynamics and play it with ease and consists of a small purple robot jumping over trucks, grabbing powers while dodging them. When you enter, you will find the home page, in which there are two buttons, the first one to start and the second one to see brief information about the game. The game has boots that give you the ability to jump higher and coins, which are registered in the upper left corner. And the trucks are configured to have different speeds and therefore a little more difficulty.
In order to explain what the Scratch platform was, Axelys had to learn the theory behind it. But, in creating Running Robots, she had to dedicate and immerse herself completely in the practical side. Because of this, she was able to expand her knowledge of coding and gain first-hand experience in the process. She could feel herself learning the function of many blocks and at the same time having fun trying to figure out which code combination would help her perform the action she had in mind. The process of creating this video game was quite an adventure for someone her me, who had never done anything like this before, and the result pleased her a lot. Neither she nor her teammates ever believed that they would make a video game by themselves, but what they are sure of is that they will improve their skills and create even better projects than this one in the not-too-distant future.
Programing our first mission
Through Lego Mindstorms, we have been able to program a robot in about 45 minutes to do certain movements that were necessary to complete successfully this mission. We had a lot of fun doing this short, but enriching, project. We were able to work on our teamwork and at the end we understood a bit more about the life of programmers and how complex this area is.