robots

Charles Guan: Build Your Everything Really Really Fast

Charles Guan: Build Your Everything Really Really Fast

Charles Guan is an MIT alumnus, and has been making projects that have been festive and amazing over the past few years. Charles has been influential in the MIT Makerspace/club MITERS, where students create all manner of great projects. He and MITERS members have been frequent fliers at various Maker Faires, so you may already be familiar with his work.

Charles has served as a Teaching Assistant at MIT in Mechanical Engineering, helping his fellow students to fabricate the contraptions of their dreams. As a TA, he’s heard the same questions over and over, so he created some instructional documentation to make his and his fellow students’ lives easier. This was a set of lectures and handouts he called How to Build Your Robot Really Really Fast (HTBYRRRF). In more recent times, he set out to update this as a more inclusive set of building guides. Drawing from his own online documentation, he was able to codify his ideas into a thorough Instructable: How to Build Your Everything Really Really Fast, or HTBYERRF.

Challenge the Kids, Challenge Yourself

Challenge the Kids, Challenge Yourself

I had twenty-four kids to walk through a detailed robot kit build. I thought we’d get through the physical build in one or two classes, and have two classes to play with the circuit and make the robot do different things. Boy, did I mis-judge things. By the end of the first class, we had barely managed to finish the first two steps of the build. I went home and collapsed for a bit. I was exhausted and not a little bit panicked.