If you haven’t seen a video of Boston Dynamic’s Spot, watch one. It’s so cool! Usually robots in the real world are just in factories, and not really like the fake old fasioned robots that can walk around and speak with that weird monotone voice. We may not be at the monotone voice part, (Good. That would be creepy.) but they are still extremely interesting. I thought making a robot dog would be a great project for learning arduino, and electronics a lot better.

READ OUR PORTFOLIO FOR THIS YEAR! It contains all that we have done over the year and is a good summary of our year. It’s available here. This year, our challenge for my robotics class in school, was a game called Freight Frenzy, sponsored by Amazon (because of course it was). The game was a lot more organization, delivery, and automation-centered. The game centered around taking cargo to certain places, in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

This may surprise you, (with me being an 8th grader who can barely tie his shoes), but I use Linux as my daily driver. I love Linux, the openness, open-source utilities, libraries taking 10 seconds to install instead of manually moving DLLs. God, it’s so nice to have literally everything in my computer available with a couple key presses. Wanna install an entire new desktop environment? $ sudo dnf install @kde-desktop-environment Wanna make a cow say the first lines of The Bee Movie script?

Last year, I had my first FTC competition. If you don’t know what FTC is, FTC is a robotics program for middle and high schools. My school offers a robotics elective from grades 7 - 12th, so I thought “Oh that’ll be cool instead of keyboarding class, and I’ve done First Lego League I’ll do it.” That probably changed my life, but that’s a story for another day. The challenge That years challenge was Ultimate Goal, in which the goal, (no pun intended,) was to shoot rings into a tower.

2 months ago, I was approached by my local 4H programs agent, and she asked me if, I would like to help teach their robotics program. Being me, I said yes. If you don’t know, 4H is a program supported by the USDA, mostly known for its stock shows. 4H also has programs for other activities. Some examples are cooking, photography, shooting sports, and sewing to name a few. But when you think of 4H normally you think of the stock show programs, which is fair.