The Time I Spent a Week at The Royal Institution and Destroyed My Nails.

Phew, school is driving me insane but I thought I'd set some time aside to talk about a wonderful week I spent at the Royal Institution (RI) destroying my nails and my mind (for very different reasons). 

Rosetta and Philae Lander

I came off a trans-Atlantic flight and was excited for the next day. I was heading to the RI to spend a week doing an introduction to robotics course. While an aspiring astrophysicist the importance of the other sciences should not be ignored. Topics such as computer programming, robotics and geology are vital for understanding out universe. We need geology to understand other planets, asteroids and comets. We need computer programming to tell telescopes where to look in the sky. We need robotics to build the brilliant robots which travel to other planets, such as the Mars Rover or the Philae Lander which will try to land on the comet 67P in the next few months. Without the other disciplines astrophysics would be much harder to comprehend and it is easy to forget that while we call the subject astrophysics and label things as work physicists do and work biologists do, these subjects are all part of one massive subject: the natural world around us. 

Anyway, I arrived on Monday just before 10 o'clock, pushing the boundaries of being late (as I normally do) and sat down at a table with three girls. I came to know that they were in the year below me and quickly figured out they were all geeks like me (thank heavens). Astrid, Luciana and Mollie were brilliant to work with (and guys my part of the project is almost done, I promise) and between us we had a fantastic array of geeky t-shirts. But I think prize for the geekiest t-shirt goes to a boy who wore one in which pi was telling an imaginary number to get real and the imaginary number was retorting by telling pi to be rational. 

We got to work on our two projects before long, one was to build a robot which could eventually go underwater and use a claw to pick things up, the other was very free and my group decided to build a robotic hand. We soon discovered the menace of the week: the elements game. About 11 elements have been discovered at the RI and to promote this the Institution have come up within a game in which you have to find the elements on a massive periodic table while The Elements Song by Tom Lehrer plays in the background. Oh the tune was fun at first, but by the end of the week whenever it came on all forty of the teenagers in the room would wince and then share a collected laugh of 'thank goodness it's getting to everyone else too!' 

We named our underwater project Enterprise (because why not?!) and our robotic claw was dubbed S.P.O.C.K (Special Purpose Operating Colour Koordinator) . 

Enterprise Mark VI

We started off Enterprise with Mark I and I believe got to about mark XI or XV before we were done. We went easy to begin with, testing gear ratios and what materials from our LEGO kits floated best to begin with and expanded it to something which could eventually sink to the bottom of the pool and then resurface and then added a working claw to it! We controlled it with battery packs from the side lines and at the end of the week did a challenge to see who could pick up the most balls. And while the group who won (they'd named their robot a mix of a scorpion, lobster and crab I believe, though I can't quite remember how they combined the names into one ) retrieved about 14 balls, my group and I were rather proud of the 6 we got. We were so close to getting 7 but off all the times for the claw not to work that was one of them so we shared third place... Willingly of course. 

Our claw was another story. The head of the camp worked at one of the UK's big robotics universities and was doing research into robots that could be used to clear up nuclear waste and had promised any one who tried a claw some extra assistance. No one in my group had used LEGO before for building robots so were rather relying on a bit of assistance to get us started off, on Thursday morning (we had to be done by Friday morning at the latest) when half of the claw was assembled and half the arm was done he comes by our table and says '... That won't work the moment caused by the arm will be too big' (when I say 'moment' here I mean the physics kind, as in a turning force, though our robot actually working definitely made us have a moment) and takes the work I'd just spent two hours on to pieces in about three seconds.

I felt like crying because I hadn't considered moments and because he'd just deconstructed my child. However, he proceeded to help Mollie and Luciana building the claw while Astrid and I worked on the programming for S.P.O.C.K as we'd decided he would be an autonomous robot (i.e he would be able to work on his own without someone controlling him). We programmed S.P.O.C.K to search for a yellow object, pick it up, and move it to a different location before continuing his search.

S.P.O.C.K - My pride and joy

It took a lot of work but the incredible feeling when S.P.O.C.K picked up a yellow block, moved it and then kept searching for the next one was the most wonderful thing! This robot became our child for a week. Good Lord, it was so depressing when about two hours after getting S.P.O.C.K to work properly for the first time after all of our hard work building him (with a bit of help from our supervisor of course) we had to take him to pieces.

We had to disassemble Enterprise as well, I think all of the groups were crying inside as they tore apart their creations.

I left on Friday with many new skills learned and friends made and the sound of 'there's antimony, arsenic, aluminium, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium' ringing in my ears. 

While the week destroyed my finger nails (they're still recovering now) and drove me insane as I sat staring intensely at S.P.O.C.K thinking 'Why won't you work?!?' It was a brilliant experience which gave me the confidence to start a robotics club at my school for which I had 16 pupils show up! 

I recommend this course, and robotics in general, to people interested in science. Robotics has so many uses in biology, chemistry, physics, maths and in everyday life that this is well worth a look at. S.P.O.C.K could have been used for sorting your darks and lights in laundry, or getting rid of that flavour of Skittle you just can't stand. You may get into Robotics and find that you want to do a degree in it! (Which is a brilliant idea, we need as many people working in STEM as we can get).

Unfortunately this course is not free and I had the opportunity to go to it because I am a Faraday member of the RI, however membership for under 25s is only £15 a year and there are lots of opportunities for courses and lectures through that membership.

I even get the chance to apply for a Silver Crest award for my work during the week on Enterprise and S.P.O.C.K! (That is if I ever finish my part of the project...)