I joined Professor Krishna Kumar’s robotics outreach event at Austin Public Library on January 11, 2025, helping kids build and test little line-following robot cars.
The kids wrote simple if-else programs to control the motors, saved their code onto small memory cards, and plugged the cards into the cars. Then they could put the cars on the track and see what their code made them do.
They made the tracks themselves, too. We spread large sheets of paper across the floor, and the kids drew their own roads with markers, complete with curves and intersections. Bulky library books became obstacles along the routes. They had a whole miniature road network to try their cars on, experimenting with both the routes and the code as they learned how the robots worked.
