Content provided by X Academy & Santa Cruz County Office of Education (Santa Cruz COE/SCCOE)

Thanks to the success of the Santa Cruz COE X Academy Robotics Club, the partnership continues this summer, this time with Farm-NG! Students across Santa Cruz County are participating in the Summer Farm Robotics Challenge. 

Recently, the students worked in teams of four, each with responsibilities for assembling one of the four “arms” of the Amiga and then bringing all four arms together to build the frame by connecting the crossbars. Then students connected the electrical system to the four arms, and by the end of the day, had built the foundation of the Amiga! However, when turning on the power, only one side of the Amiga had power, leaving students to figure out where connections were not made correctly in the assembly process. 

This is the expected process in engineering - to build, test, diagnose the problem and go back to figure out how to solve the problem.

This past week, students began to learn the software to program the Amiga to run autonomously. Students will be setting up a Github account to document and store their portfolio of programs. They will also be getting exposed to Python programming.

Within the program there are 15 students participating from 6 Watsonville-area high schools and one-third of the students are young women. Most of the students are participating as paid interns with funding and educational support through Hartnell College's "Learning to Lead" NEXTGEN grant from USDA to expose students to careers in agriculture.

The challenge concludes at the end of August but the partnership continues. The Santa Cruz County Office of Education is continuing to partner with X Academy to create another award-winning robotics program.

If you have high school students in the county, we invite you and your students to the open house in Santa Cruz or Watsonville September 7th and 8th or register your students for the program immediately! Sign-up to attend the open house to learn more and find out about the program - https://cs.santacruzcoe.org/robotics