Bloom Hamner

Magic of Robotics Appeals to Greenies




Magic of Robotics Appeals to Greenies

Engineering students get hands-on experience

Every budding engineer has to start somewhere.

Miller Kaderabek '18 not only throws around equations, formulas, and calculations in Christ School's Innovation Lab. He gets to build robots, lots of them.

Miller and the rest of his Honors Principles of Engineering class have constructed eight robots this semester. Every subsequent project is slightly more complicated than the one before. Miller, Joe deLoach '18, and West Shuler '19 successfully designed, built, and programmed a robot to help guide elderly people in the dark just before Thanksgiving Break.

"We were trying to come up with something that had a real-world use," Miller said. "We used three different sensors to solve a problem. You turn on (the robot) with a button. Once the button is pressed, if you approach the sensor, it will move. If it's dark, there is a flashlight in the front. I want to go into Engineering. I think it's great we get to use our creativity this way."

West agreed wholeheartedly.

"It's awesome to get this kind of hands-on work," he said. "I'm not sure what career path I'm going to go down right now. This is definitely a good experience though."

Back in October, the same group of Engineering students and their robots took part in the "Hill Climb Challenge" during a Chapel service. The goal was to get their remote-controlled machines to climb an incline that got steeper with each round. Cheers from the student body determined the winning group.

Marcel Duhaime has taught Robotics at Christ School for three years. His students are asked to showcase their work and sum up projects through digital portfolios.

An even more advanced group of Greenies travel off campus to UNC Asheville where they are together on the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team. The FRC team is open to all high school students in the Asheville area and its activities include design and fabrication, programming, strategy, game play, team building, fundraising, and community outreach.