My legs felt like noodles as I walked to camp. It was my first day of the two weeks I would be there. I was trudging up the tall hill to the main building and after my mom filled out some forms, I was guided towards the fields with an occasional tree around it. I saw that I wasn't alone but I was nervous and wasn't interested in making friends. The buildings were on a college campus and the buildings had a very old look. While on the outside they appeared gothic, they were fairly modern on the interior. The looks of the interior and exterior led to a unique feeling that made you either want to be there or get away as fast as you could go. At around 8:30 in the morning, a storm of overnight campers came from the enormous cafeteria. It was like a herd of stampeding bison. We all got in a circle and were told who we had our classes with and then were dismissed. I rushed to meet the person that was teaching robotics whose name was Cooper. From there I went to the third floor and meet the other kids in the class whose names were Kailyn and Jordan. It definitely wasn't the biggest class around.
A soon as we had sat down in our seats we attempted to look in our boxes with the parts in them. Cooper countered, “We will get to the chassis later, but right now we have to go over the safety papers.” I felt like I was going to be bored because there were two full pages of pure cautions and facts about batteries and other electronic parts. After a grueling half-hour of going over things not to do and ways to get hurt if we do the wrong thing we finally managed to finish the first step. As soon as finished the group got right to building the chassis. The chassis is the structure of the robot and what might have a method of transportation attached. Cooper gave us instructions from the handbook as we followed his guide. First, we had to carefully remove the metal chassis from the thin plastic bag it was contained in. Second we had to gather a bunch of parts including metal standoffs, metal Philips head screws, metal slot head screws, plastic screws (for the batteries), 360˚ servos and the plastic wheels (for grip). As I assembled the chassis, it started to take shape. The chassis alone, ended up looking like a rectangular beetle on wheels. It was the next day and I was looking forward to robotics. I had a feeling that we would do something amazing but I didn’t know what. I asked Cooper and he said it was a secret till we go to the third floor and sit down at our desks. I knew I had to wait but I couldn’t. As soon as robotics was dismissed I rushed upstairs like a sprinting cheetah that just ate way too much sugar. I didn’t see the chassis out so I assumed that we wouldn’t be building. And then Cooper announced, “Today we will be programming!” I had done lots of coding before (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++ and Arduino) so I expected a normal programming language. I was so wrong. With the fact that I only had servos and wheels on the chassis I wondered how we would program a servo without a microcontroller. Right after that, Cooper announced, “We are going to finish the basic robot. We are going to need our standoffs.” It removed the standoffs (which are metal cylinders) and some other parts including the microcontroller, the circuit board and some screws. After attaching these in a predictable fashion I plugged the circuit board to the computer I opened the text editor and while being guided by Cooper I learned all about FOR NEXT, DO LOOP, IF ELSE, ELSEIF and ENDIF. A table then posed as a challenge waiting to be overtaken. As instructed by code, my robot made a right turn and ran right into the leg of the table. After a large number of revisions my robot made it! It didn’t do all of it though, so I had to add more code. A right turn there, a left turn there, turn ninety degrees, and go! It wove its way through the sturdy legs just missing one as it went. It made the last turn and landed right at the starting line! After quite a lot of code and time I had made it work. And then we had to finish our robot. I’d thought I was done after putting on the circuit board, but I definitely wasn’t done. We had to add whiskers to the robot. The whiskers looked like very bent metal wire. Now, at the time I thought it was weird to put whiskers on a robot, but then I figured out how they worked. When there was pressure on the whisker it would touch the metal wire completing the circuit and sending a message to the “brain” of the robot. After the last lesson I thought I knew how to program it but then a confusing thing turned up. When I tried to make code that checked if the whiskers were pressed I used the number one as true and zero as false which is called a Boolean. Except, in P-basic, that is not how it works. In P-basic you use zero as true and one as false. After setting up the code on the old and slow computer with no internet, I plugged in Curious George and put the code on his circuit board. I set his switch to 0 turning him off and then put him on the blue carpet. I carefully moved the switch to 2 and then hoped for the best. He moved at around two miles per hour and when he hit a wall a light on him flashed and he turned and went somewhere else. In conclusion, after two weeks of building, programming and solving problems I came home with a robot named Curious George. The second I got home I turned on Curious George and watched him run around. As soon as my dog Max heard something downstairs he sprinted down the wooden stairs and found out what was making all the noise. He must have thought it was living and dangerous, because he jumped around and barked at it. The cats soon joined in and then it was jumping party. To this day, Curious George is still roaming around, running into walls.
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