A team of St. Vrain Valley high schoolers who use underwater robots to help Longmont monitor water quality are getting extra help this summer from middle school students attending a “Creative Technology for Good” camp.
The Innovation Center student designers, who are helping the city look for unwanted weeds in water reservoirs using underwater robots, designed the camp curriculum to outsource some of their projects, including a water level monitor, a 15-minute timer for a pressure seal test and a warning system in case boat or robot bumps into something.
Kaden Richards, an underwater robotics student designer who will be a senior at Silver Creek High School, said he found his spark building robots and signed up to help teach the camp because he wants to share that with younger students.
“I want them to get passion and drive,” said Richards, who’s planning to major in mechanical and electrical engineering. “I want them to get this spark so they can say, ‘When I see electronics, I can build something out of it.’ I want them to see this project is possible and think what else is possible.”
For the eighth year, St. Vrain’s Innovation Center teamed up with the University of Colorado Boulder and the Northrop Grumman Corp. to offer a week of STEM camps for middle and high school students. About 60 middle and high school students spent the week in four STEM camps at Timberline PK-8 in Longmont, learning about cybersecurity, robotics and coding.
The classes were designed and taught by Innovation Center student designers and teachers with help from Northrop Grumman volunteers. Along with class time, students visited CU and heard from panels of Northrop employees and St. Vrain graduates attending CU. They also showed their families what they learned at a Friday exhibition.
“We’re trying to connect the dots for kids,” said Axel Reitzig, St. Vrain’s executive director of innovation. “One really consistent theme is play and exploration. Camps are a way to try things out. If they like it, then they can enroll in a class or join an Innovation Center team.”
The middle schoolers used supplies such as electrical wires, sensors and LED lights, plus an Arduino microcontroller, to build the projects for the “Technology For Good” camp.
Natalia Schwening, a rising sixth grader at Altona Middle, was working on building a flotation device for the water level monitor. She said she’s attended several STEM camps, but this one was her favorite.
“Some STEM camps, the teachers do everything, so we don’t get to do anything hands-on,” she said. “Here, we get to build our own stuff. I’ve had a blast so far.”
The two cybersecurity camps, one for beginners and one for more advanced students, were based on national CyberPatriot competitions. The more advanced group worked on writing a script that would take care of the more “mundane” tasks required in the six-hour competition, giving them more time to search for more complex threats.
In the fourth camp, students met and learned to code socially assistive robots, with instructions to give the small robot a fun personality that could be used in the classroom.
“You get to code a lot and have fun with the robots,” said rising sixth grader Caleb Wong as he demonstrated making the robot spin in circles. “These robots work great for learning. Or they could work the front desk at your school. It all just depends what you code.”
