Teaching

In August 2003 I taught a course in Robotics at the Lincoln Intermediate Unit Summer Academy at Penn State York Campus. It was a lot of fun for myself and the students, all middle schoolers. We used the Lego Dacta system which was good for basics but limited for advanced projects.

At Computer Link I taught courses in using basic software: Word Processing, SpreadSheet, Database. This was in 1984, right after the Macintosh came out.

Recently I have become more interested in teaching. I recently taught a course in how to build a fighting robot as part of the Carlisle High School Adult Education program. The course generated a lot of interest. As a measure of its success, nearly all of the students built fighting robots , some from scratch, some hacked from commercial products.

Another nice thing: most of my students also decided to form a club, now called PennBots. See our website for more information.

I have also been working with a gifted young man in robotics projects. We are building a bot that can find its way through a maze. Our dream is to build one that can compete in the arena against a human controlled opponent. It would get a serious weight advantage to compensate for the intelligence of its competitor.