Plant Bot, a story from our partner Magnanibots
By Carnegie Mellon Robotics Academy
The best robotics lessons help students connect what they are learning to problems they already know. During the ‘Buggy Bugs’ lesson in CMRA’s Fundamentals of Coding with SPIKE Essential, an eight-year-old student at Magnanibots connected an activity about debugging and agricultural robotics to a crop pest he knew and set out to design a robot of his own: Plant Bot. Further research suggested that the pest he described could be the cotton boll weevil, which threatens cotton in the Colombian Caribbean, and that his prototype might point toward a real challenge in detecting its damage.
In the article below, Magnanibots Academic Director and CMRA Certified Educator Margarita Oliveros shares how a student’s first robotics lesson grew into an inventive idea rooted in his own experience.
"It reflects what we see across our students in the CMRA SPIKE programs. They connect the lessons to the world they know."
- Margarita Oliveros, Magnanibots
