Robotics Class in Prepa 20, Monterrey, Mexico, Summer of 2023

Description:

Robotics Class – Summer of 2023

Hello, this is Alexander Gholmieh a.k.a. Alexander Gholmieh Ayala as my full name would be written in Mexico. As a second generation Mexican American, I wanted to share my knowledge of robotics with a small group of high school students going into their senior year at my mom’s high school in Santiago, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

The class was a great success. I did the following:

Collected family and friends donations for buying enough Arduino kits for a class of 10 students.
Coordinated with the Secretariat of Development of the Municipality of Santiago, and then with Professor Adolio Sanchez Villareal from the Prepa 20 in Santiago NL Mexico. The school had a thriving Robotics club that competed nationally and internationally. Professor Adolio selected 10 students whose levels ranged from intermediary to advanced to participate in the class.
I ran the class for 2 weeks. The class used 2 readily available Arduino kits to introduce and then deep dive into component and algorithmic aspects of Robotics. In each class, the students built a circuit, and implemented a kit tutorial, then were invited to modify the programs to meet specific challenges. Each class lasted 3 hours with about 2 hours and 30 minutes dedicated to robotics. and the final half hour dedicated to improving conversational English.
The last class consisted of competitions with the winning teams receiving prizes.
All the classes were given primarily in English to help the students improve their English skills in addition to the robotics class materials. My knowledge of Spanish was also indispensable on most days in order to effectively communicate with the participating students.
At the end, much learning and great fun were had by all, and the kits were donated to the thriving Robotics club at the school.

I hope that my humble example will encourage other Mexican Americans to get involved with their Mexican towns of origins to help the kids there develop and make lasting impact.

Quick Overview

In the rest of this webpage, I will describe in detail how I organized the Robotics class, how it went and what I learned. Please feel free to reuse any ideas or materials presented here.

But first some pictures: