G.I.R.L. Tech
(Growing Interest in Robotics and Learning Technology)
Project Description
G.I.R.L. Tech ("Growing Interest in Robotics and Learning Technology") focused on promoting robotics through peer interaction and play. It was a semester-long ETC project done in my 2nd semester as an ETC student during the Spring of 2009. G.I.R.L. Tech's goal was to foster interest in robotics within two audiences: adolescent girls and young children. Our project clients were the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, focusing on youths and their parents, and the Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvania and the YWCA of Greater Pittsburgh, focusing on high school-aged girls.
G.I.R.L. Tech's end of the semester project deliverable had two parts: a robotic painter installation for the Children's Museum and an eight-week robotics program for the high school girls from the YWCA and Girl Scouts.
Robotic Installation
The robotic painter installation was created to introduce young children to robotics through play and interaction. A child would draw an image on the touchscreen of the installation, then watch the colors s/he drew with get sucked in to the 3 colored wires leading to a still robotic arm. The robotic arm would come to life and take that data and recreate the child's painting using real paints and a plexiglass sheet, recreating the drawing stroke for stroke just like the child.
It was our intent and the intent of the museum to not lie to the child and make them believe this robot was alive, but rather to help them understand that they could input a command and the robot would copy based upon a program's interpretation of data. With this in mind, we hid nothing about the inner-workings of the robot. The back panel is surrounded in thick transparent plexiglass, showing the wires and laptop running the code to make Lynxie, our robotic arm, execute. The colored wires create a line from the touchscreen to the computer to the robot to give a child an understanding that this is something that is created, not magically living. The structure itself was kept simple and "raw" in order to match the theme of the garage room of the museum, which is where this installation is intended to be placed.
High School Girls' Robotics Program
Robotics is a field of study with a small female demographic. In order to address this, G.I.R.L. Tech led an eight-week program for high school girls to teach them about robotics and show them the different aspects of this field. We pooled applicants from the local Girl Scouts of Western Pennsylvani and the YWCA of the Greater Pittsburgh Area and had 15 girls participate in this program.
For three hours per day, two days per week, we would split the girls into two groups, one of which focused on mechanical engineering and the other which focused on computer programming. Using a Bioloids kit, the girls created two robotic arms similar to ours in structure and programmed them in Python to play tic-tac-toe on a plexiglass sheet using paint markers identical to the robotic painter installation.
In addition to the classwork and lectures we provided, we also had field trips to robotics labs and related studios, including the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, where space and exploration robotics were developed, and Mechanimal Studios, where Pittsburgh Museum animatronics were created. These field trips were designed to show the girls the different areas of entertainment and science that focus on robotics.
Primary Contributions
G.I.R.L. Tech, while we all had our designated roles, was a team effort from beginning to end, with everyone contributing in some way or form to each step of the process.
With that said, these are the contributions I made that I believe to be significant and worthy of noting:
The Team
Laura Lantz (producer)
Theresa Chen (designer & artist)
Lindsay Williams (programmer)
Charles Daniels (programmer)
Lauren Etta (mechanical engineer)
Rebecca Riggs (mechanical engineer)
Betsy McIver (mechanical engineer)
Shashank Srinivasan (3D artist)
