Robotics In 5th Grade

So in October of 2018 we started our 3rd year of Robotics. We didn’t start right away building robots, what we did was sort out pieces of Lego robots for the younger grades. We did this for 2 weeks and then we moved on to start working on a new robot. We took apart Galaxy (look at 4th grade page) and made a new robot for competition purposes. We worked for 2 sessions (4 hours) to build Milky Way our new robot. Then we started testing out the robot so we could make sure she worked. We did do a lot of troubleshooting, but in the end it all worked out. Then we talked about who would be the drivers and who would be the programmer. We decided that Emma and Mady would be the drivers and I (Emelda) would be the programmer. We the started the training.

Mrs. McClure told us that the competition we would be going to was in February (February 9th, specifically) and that was the latest she could get. We thought we would have enough time to do it, but we were mistaken. Around December or January I had finished the program that I had worked really hard on, but it was all wacky and we weren’t able to fix it in time.

Then, about 1-3 weeks before the competition was supposed to come, Ms. McClure told us to come during recess and told us that we weren't ready for the competition. She gave us two options, we could go to the competition just for the experience even though we were not ready or we could skip the competition and she would set up what is called a scrimmage. A scrimmage is basically a mini-competition. We had a few days to decide and we decided that we were not gonna go to the competition.

So we started preparing for the scrimmage. Mady and Emma kept driving and I restarted my program using a different website. Then after 1 month, Ms. McClure told us that she was unable to get any teams that wanted to be in our scrimmage, and so that did not happen. Instead, we did assemblies for the whole school to see what we have accomplished. And we worked on this website.

We then had our last day of robotics, we watched the movie Wall-e. We really enjoyed robotics and were such hard-workers during these three years. Obviously, we are headed off to middle school and we will no longer have robotics but, it was definitely fun while we did have it and I will never forget it.