This was for a Gap year fellowship at hackclub, which was rejected. HackClub is an organization helping teen makers build more projects.
Elevator pitch
Design an out of this world animated robotics character! Just robotics won’t cut it, teenagers need to design magical stories and bring them to life through robotics. Stories are critical to everything in life, and infusing them into machines give them a unique and tangible aspect that is rarely perfected. Disney Imagineering started with a dream; now they have world-class animatronics. You get the chance to do the same.
YSWS Requirements
Design a robot that is expressive and more than a machine, build it for under $100, and ship a moving, living character! Share with the world your real life character! Who knows, people may fall in love with it. Going out on a limb here, but AI agents are allowed (stay with me)! Since designing and bringing a character to life is such a complex project, using AI to embody a character or help with ROS can speed up development of the character easily. We don't want slop and 100% AI work, but if its used properly it can quickly s1peed up the design process!
Rewards
The most obvious and immediate reward is receiving the hardware for your robot. It would also be fun to have other rewards based on popularity. Things like stickers, AI credits, or a consumer robots like Looma or KOCH robotic arm. Ranking systems in the past from Hackclub have historically been difficult and painful, so instead of having definite prizes, the community is encouraged to upvote projects gallerys they like, and the top 5 projects will enter a prize draw.
How this applies to my Skill set
I am a design engineer. I yearn for integrating creative story telling with physical engineering machines and robots. Over the years I have created bland machines that are functional, proving my mechanical and electrical technical skills, but no one wants that. I have hundreds of sketches on inventions, robotic characters and machines, but the only things that I have built IRL are the easy things: the machines that don’t require surface modelling, the things that don't have the appearance life, the functional bits. I want to change that, and I want to help teenagers change their perspective on that too. It isn’t impossible to fuse character design with real robotics, but it is a new skill set that needs expanding.
Logistics
Multidisciplinary YSWS like this will require more than code tracked by Hackatime, so Lapse will be used to capture the mechanical and build aspects of the project.
As for budget, I believe it will take a solid 20 hours to fully create a good robot, but not all of those hours will be captured before purchases are made. Instead, Hack clubbers are encouraged to build in two phases, with a prototype phase for some parts, and a final phase to create the complete design and share. Along the way there will be community checkups on progress that I will host, to try to help others.
To attract new teenagers, I will get other teenagers to share in their schools robotics clubs, and maybe drop it in a robotics reddit. I will for sure make a YouTube video on my channel or Hackclub’s channel introducing it.