Each Monday afternoon our Director of Educational Technology and Innovation, Ashley Swinney, hosts an open lab time for students who are interested in pursuing personal projects in the Innovation Lab.

This past Monday launched our Maker Monday series in the Graves Family Center for Innovation labs. Each week students will be introduced to a new feature of the lab and will have the opportunity to focus on different techniques, concepts, and skills. This past week the focus was robotics! Students spent time building robots with the goal of creating one that would be able to “battle” other bots. Each robot was designed with a balloon that needed to be protected. Additionally, each robot had to pop the opponent’s balloon!

Taking a multifaceted approach, students built the robot, and the individual shields to protect and attack other robots. Activities like this, outside of the classroom time students will spend in the Innovation Lab, allow each kid to explore and meet like-minded students who they might not have interacted with before. It’s fostering creativity and making space for trial and error so that we can innovate and design products and solutions that will spur us on to dream bigger.

We’re already having the best time seeing what students create and look forward to many a robot battle in the future!