Excerpts from Daily Journal Online’s article:

“Early this year, the local 4-H chapter and MU Extension introduced some Bismarck students to creating their own robotic animals through programming and creativity.

Youth Program Coordinator Kayce Amsden and former aerospace engineer Ann Boes brought the idea to the school as part of a grant from Cognizant.

About twice a week after school, students in elementary and junior high worked to build robotic animals that respond to or perform functions programmed on the computer.

‘The idea is to help kids learn computing and to tie it in to making physical things,’ Boes said.

‘It’s created using drag-and-drop programming,’ said Nathan Pruett, a business and technology teacher who is helping them. ‘Drag-and-drop is where instead of writing the verbiage of the code, there will be a list of files to click,’ Pruett said. ‘They can pull commands from a database and then watch a simulated version of their physical robot.’

‘For many of them it’s probably their first time coding, so they’re really learning a lot about the basics of coding electronics,’ Boes said.”

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