NEW — 2:56 p.m. Sept. 28, 2015
Sanjeev Dwivedi had never taught the basics of robotics to anyone until six months ago.
By Neil Pierson
Arnav Sacheti (left), an eighth-grader at Inglewood Middle School, and Shreyas Jagalur, an eighth-grader at Pine Lake Middle School, have been working with Microsoft programmer Sanjeev Dwivedi on some advanced robotics projects.
That’s when Dwivedi, a Sammamish resident and Microsoft employee, partnered with two teams of students in the FIRST Lego League, a worldwide organization that uses competitive environments to teach the fundamentals of robotics to students in grades four through eight.
One of the students he met was Arnav Sacheti, then a seventh-grader at Inglewood Middle School. Sacheti’s team reached the Lego League state semifinals, and Dwivedi was motivated to keep teaching because of the intelligence he saw in the youngsters.
“I thought, ‘Let me see how far they can go,’” Dwivedi said.
He began mentoring Sacheti outside school hours, and soon had other students joining in. One of them was Shreyas Jagalur, then a seventh-grader at Pine Lake Middle School.
Over the past few months, Dwivedi has been giving robotics lessons to boys and girls ages 11-13. Some students are placed in an introductory class, while those with more knowledge, like Sacheti and Jagalur, are in an advanced course. Sacheti, in fact, has been mentoring many of his peers.
“When you’re teaching, you’re actually learning more than when you’re” a student, Sacheti explained.
Dwivedi quickly realized Sacheti’s and Jagalur’s potential, and put them to work on some summer projects. Prior to starting their eighth-grade year, Sacheti built a home alarm system with a motion sensor, while Jagalur pieced together a rescue robot designed to find people trapped under debris.
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The students and their instructor presented their projects and findings at the Sept. 12 Seattle Code Camp, a free event where professionals and students interact on a wide variety of topics, such as web design, mobile apps and video-game development.
Dwivedi wanted to see if he could teach middle-schoolers the same programming concepts that most students don’t learn until their first or second years of college.
“I think I partially succeeded in my goal,” he said. “They need a couple more years of education before they can understand some of the finer concepts. But for a grade-seven student, this is, in my mind, pretty brilliant.”
Sacheti spent 60-70 hours on his alarm system. He used C programming language to build the framework on a laptop computer, which connects to a keypad, motion sensor and LCD screen. The alarm can be armed or disarmed using a hashtag key and four-digit code. If the sensor detects motion while the system is armed, a beeping sound occurs.
There are bugs to work out, he admitted. The keypad isn’t fully functional, and users can’t choose a code that has consecutive digits.
“Probably the hardest thing is, you have so many of the same colored wires, you want to make sure you don’t mess up anything, so you have to double-check everything to make sure it’s all synched up with this and that,” Sacheti said.
Jagalur’s “rescue robot” required 20-25 hours of work. There was less programming involved, but making the hardware functional was difficult, he said.
The two-wheeled robot is built largely out of Legos. It’s powered by four batteries and has two arms at the front for grabbing objects. It’s a smaller version of what real-life rescue crews already use to locate survivors in earthquakes or tsunamis, for example.
When the robot is activated, it spends about 40 seconds calibrating, and then can turn in circles or move in a straight line based on any motion it detects.
Jagalur said he’s looking to make improvements — the robot doesn’t turn in a circle very well because the motor doesn’t distribute power equally to both sides. It’s a lengthy trial-and-error process to fix it, he explained.
Dwivedi said the boys did most of the work on their own; he only stepped in when they were completely stumped.
He’s accepting new students for his classes, and his goal is to help inspire a new generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. During his work with Microsoft, he’s traveled many times to California’s Silicon Valley, and said many of the “super talented people” he has met there were exposed to programming and coding at young ages.
“Essentially, if someone is willing to drink, I’m going to feed them from a fire hose and see how far they can go,” Dwivedi said.
