Academic Awards at Gallatin Gateway School

Having fun while building robots, kids learn computer skills

By BETH SLOVIC | Chronicle Staff Writer

GALLATIN GATEWAY -- The robot was spinning instead of moving forward.

Cameron Greger, 9, and his friend, Christopher Ross, 11, wondered what was wrong.

"I don't know why, Cameron, but we have a glitch," Christopher said, without a hint of frustration.

Mike Coon, a technology teacher at Gallatin Gateway School, intervened.

For four days this week, Coon oversaw the school's Technology Camp, where 14 kids from the third through the seventh grades built robots and designed computer programs to make the robots flip, spin and circle a track.

The camp was one in a series of summer programs at the school, which also hosted several sports camps this summer.

Unlike the others, Technology Camp was designed to give the school's students a jumpstart on problem-solving skills they will need to tackle advanced computer projects, Coon said.

On Thursday, Cameron and Christopher were doing just that.

Together, the boys had built a robot using high-tech Legos and then wrote a computer program that was supposed to tell the robot what to do.

The assembly was designed to work when a small gadget hooked up to a computer sent an infrared signal to another, tiny computer attached to the robot.

The computer program the boys had written seemed to be working.

But the robot clearly was not. At one point, when it bumped against Coon's foot, it started spiraling endlessly.

With Coon's help, however, the boys talked about what could be causing the problem. The robot, called Guardbot, was supposed to hit an obstacle and automatically reverse direction.

But the bumper, the group realized, was not activating the touch sensor that would make the robot turn around and head back in the direction from which it had come.

Then a moment of brilliance struck.

Cameron moved a part and the robot suddenly was doing what it was designed to do.

"I don't know, it just came to me," Cameron said, nonchalantly explaining how he figured out the problem. "I was tossing around ideas and the first one worked."

On the other side of the classroom, Margaret Siberell, 9, and Kyra Fisher, 8, talked about having experienced a similar problem the day before.

"We named the robot Spin, because all it did was spin," Margaret said.

The girls explained that they had reversed some wires on the robot, corrected the error, and the robot did what they wanted it to do.

"It went back and forth and then spun twice," Margaret said of the robot she built with Kyra.

After almost three straight hours of programing and building Thursday morning, the children took a break to eat lunch around noon. It was their first break of the day.

"It's a testament to how much they like this," Coon said.

Summer Camps at Gallatin Gateway School

Summer Camps at
Gallatin Gateway School