by Cavin Jacobson | Jun 24, 2019 | Arts and Entertainment, News Slider, Radio
BisonBot is in its 13th year of teaching engineering and robotics skills to students from elementary through high schools. The four-week camp, put on by Lipscomb Engineering, features four different groups that each spend a week learning engineering skills while building and operating robots. The robots range from simple moving gears to fully-functioning arms that can move objects off of a conveyor belt. The campers’ experience levels range from the first time with electronics, all the way up to advanced students who have been building robotics and engineering for years. “We don’t require that [the students] have any previous robotics knowledge before they come in, although a lot of the kids do,” said Ginger Reasonover, the coordinator of BisonBot camp. She is also a Science teacher at Lipscomb Academy. The four groups are the wee bots, who are between kindergarten and first grade, the juniors, who are between second and third grade, the fundamentals camp includes fourth through seventh graders and the advanced camp is for children that have had robotics experience. The advanced camp, for students in seventh through 12th grade, is mostly for students who have done the camp in the past. Every other year is the Robotics Academy where students learn how to program as well as build a robot. That will take place in next summer. The students get to take approximately five different robot projects that they built home with them. The youngest age group only builds their robots for a show-and-tell with the group and with their parents. The two older groups are split into teams of two and compete in a game...
