How to build a robot in three days
The club, active year-round, recorded and explained their progress in both facilities throughout the weekend, which the students now use for outreach to high school students interested in STEM, according to King. Ri3D is associated with the international FIRST Robotics competition, an event for high school students with more than 80,000 participants from around the world.
He said that while the Penn State team is only competing against the clock in their event, the group plays an important supportive and educational role for the high school participants. By posting their progress on social media through photos and several explanatory videos that provide a detailed look into the technical aspects of building a robot, they can inspire and assist high school students looking to improve their own methods of building.
“When the challenge is released by FIRST at noon on Saturday, our seven different subteams — mechanical, electrical and so on — strategize together and then break off into our subgroups to work,” King said, noting that his older brother, Rio, is the lead of one team and his younger brother, Marco, leads the final video production. “Our media team aims to release a cinema-quality robot reveal by 7 p.m. on the final day of the competition. They storyboard, film, edit and publish a two-minute video in just seven hours.”
That video, a key component of outreach for high school STEM students, garnered more than 31,000 views. King said that the other, more technical videos represent the real purpose of Ri3D: to explain not only the mechanisms the team chose but also why they chose them and what else they tried first. The team also kept an active Instagram account leading up to and during their first competition.
While this was only year one for Ri3D at Penn State, King said they plan to build on this success in the future, further capitalizing on University tools and facilities like the EDI Building and OriginLabs, as well as student experience and enthusiasm, to design and build new robots and expand their outreach efforts.
