Recap of National Robotics Week Workshop
This past weekend, the CP Mentorship Robotics Outreach Committee hosted an exciting hands on robotics event in partnership with National Robotics Week. The event brought together aspiring engineers, students, and robotics enthusiasts for a memorable experience. The event featured a guest speaker, live demos, workshops, and time for attendees to play with real robots.
The event opened with an inspiring presentation by guest speaker Faye Lin, founder of AquaMeridian US. Faye's talk, titled "Robotics for the Real World," carried a message that robots don't replace humans, they extend what humans can do.
Faye's journey is incredibly unique and far from normal. She began scuba diving at age 12, she witnessed underwater kelp forests disappearing and turning into underwater deserts. This sparked a passion to find scalable solutions. With 88% of California's kelp forests already lost, she knew that divers alone couldn't turn the tide. So she turned to robotics. By 13, she had already started research, going on to become a Broadcom MASTERS finalist, ISEF finalist, STS Scholar, and published IEEE researcher. All before attending UC Berkeley for Data Science and Economics.
Through AquaMeridian, Faye developed underwater ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) that work alongside divers to map ocean floors and collect sea urchins, achieving 10x faster mapping than divers working alone. She walked attendees through the full development journey. From a basic PVC prototype to a working ROV, a full redesigned system, modular tools for different tasks, and finally real world ocean deployment.
After the guest presentation, attendees were lead through three hands on workshops covering the basics of robotics
Software — Participants got an introduction to block-based robot programming, learning how to code a robot to drive forward, turn, and navigate a course using simple "Drive" commands in Vex Code VR.
CAD (Computer-Aided Design) with Tinkercad — Students learned how to design 3D objects from scratch, including a step-by-step guide to building a fire truck model using basic shapes, resizing, and spatial manipulation.
Real-World Applications — This session put the full picture together to show what attendees were building and how robotics is already solving real problems in the world around us.
From 3:00 to 4:00 PM, it was the playtesting session. Attendees got to interact with four different robots:
Bittle X Robot Dog — a nimble, programmable robot dog that can even do a backflip!
Six-Legged Robot — a six-legged robot that moved in surprisingly lifelike ways.
Micro:bit Car — a small programmable vehicle powered by a easy to code microbit.
Otto Robots — open source, buildable robots that can do funny dance moves and obstacle detection.
The playtesting session was a vital part of the event, as it gave demonstrations on how it can look and move in the real world.
A Huge Thank You
This event wouldn't have been possible without our incredible volunteers, presenters, and of course our guest speaker Faye Lin for sharing her inspiring story and vision. A special thank you to National Robotics Week for partnering with us to make robotics accessible and exciting for the next generation.
Stay tuned for future events and if you missed this one, we hope to see you at the summer camp!
Written by Nathan Chiu
