MassRobotics and the Harvard BioDesign Lab’s Soft Robotics Toolkit have teamed up to provide a hands-on educators workshop to help introduce the world of soft robotics. The workshop provided an introduction to instructional materials developed by Harvard researchers for teaching soft robotics within classrooms or workshop settings. Educators with various levels of expertise gathered at MassRobotics on October 11th for an evening of learning and creating.

This workshop focused on one of the tutorial guides available on the Soft Robotics Toolkit that can be easily downloaded by educators or students to learn how to make components of soft robots.

As part of the workshop educators fabricated an actuator- the component of a machine responsible for moving and/or controlling a mechanism or system. This lesson helped the educators gain an understanding of how a student might follow along with the activity. We are planning to hold future sessions with educators as well as pilot some of these programs for student classes.

Thank you to Sara Berndt, Max Herman and Dmitry Popov from Harvard’s Biodesign Lab for bringing us this terrific workshop, and to Denise Mytko and Russell Nickerson from MassRobotics for their energy, enthusiasm and assistance during the event!