Kiryat Gat


In the beginning of the summer vacation, in the thirteen of July, we managed a robotics happening for a boarding school of youth at risk in Kiryat Gat.
We met the boarding school through an old member of the team from 2008 that volunteer there as his service year before recruiting for military. The kids in this school go there as a result of problems in his family.

We made four stations for the kids:
The first station was about 2009's robot. We explained the kids about our project and demonstrated them how the robot works while showing them how it chases and shoot balls on a trailer connected to a moving chassis that we build especially for this day. The kids really enjoyed to collect the thrown balls and to put them back in the robot, and afterwards they also experienced controlling the robot.
The second station was a competition between FLL robots. Our FLL teams helped us to build and program robots that can be controlled via the Bluetooth. We made a game for the kids and organized a competition between them. In addition, we also allowed them to change the robots by telling them how to switch the robot-arms that we built before, in order to let them plan their strategy independently.
In the third station we let the kids control the VEX and a robot dressed-up as Snow-White, and they really enjoyed it.
In the fourth station the kids needed to build a car working on air and a hot air balloons.
Despite the distance that required us to come with two trains, the huge and hard work we needed to prepare for this day, and the fact that the happening was a day before the Bagrut in math, we really enjoyed the happening and especially the joy we caused the kids. The kids really liked the attention we gave them and enjoyed playing with the robots. The happening was a huge success and we decided to come again next years and make the happening a tradition of Steampunk and Kiryat Gat.