Of robots and (wo)men
The third event of women plus plus was a creative one! It took place on a Sunday morning at the Impact Hub in Zürich. 16 women, 2 kids and 2 men (yes men ) were invited to the event. There were more applications than spots and one little bird found its way to the meetup as well (though it could not stay). The places were limited due to the room’s size. But also, because at this event, we were putting together a little robot and then programming it. 20 robots assembly kits were kindly sponsored! A huge thank you to the partners of the event ifolor, Mime Industries UK, impactHub and codeweek!
Building the robots
But back to the robots. We were working on the Mirobot, a wifi drawing robot.
On the website of Mime Industries UK, it says it is for children, but I am sure they also meant big children. The robot parts came in a little box together with an instruction very alike the ones you get from IKEA. For the ones who respond better to moving pictures, the producer offers how-to videos and a more detailed instruction on its internet page.
For the very clumsy ones (like the writer of this blog), there were also six instructors present who would help you. Despite my clumsiness, I was pleasantly surprised how easy the assembly part was.
Controlling the robots
It was way harder to connect the mirobot to the wifi and ultimately control it with the computer. Mostly because all of a sudden there were 20 mirobots showing up on the wifi and no one knew which one was hers or his… The instructors had their hands full solving this little issue.
Python and JavaScript
While the instructors were figuring out a solution, the participants got two presentations on coding. Ultimately, we wanted the little robots to draw something. In order to tell them what they should draw, we had to send them some code. There are several ways and languages to do so. The first presentation was about Python, a very easy to learn coding language which can be used for many, many things like game programming, data science, commanding a robot, etc. The second language presented was JavaScript, which I personally know mostly from the web development but apparently it is also quite useful to make robots move. There was the whole scale of programming skills in the room, from total noobs to proficient coders… I personally went on with Python and I think the two ladies left and right of me also did some coding in Python.
Lines and Circles
The goal was to let the robot draw our name, which sounds very easy, but of course it was not (depending on your name). What I especially liked about programming this little robot was, that you could immediately see in real life what your code was doing. One time I calculated a corner wrong and my robot just went off in a completely false direction (in fact directly into my laptop).
The spirit was very friendly and open in the room and you could ask any instructor or a participant for help! And from what I saw, the names looked pretty good and also correctly spelled ;)
My little robot is currently sitting at home on my desk, awaiting the next orders…
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Partners of the event
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Would you like to read more about coding, tech and data? Head over to Blondiesblog!
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written by
Anna
data and tech enthusiast
