We had the incredible opportunity to spend a transformative week in Cairo, Egypt, contributing to Tech Trek: Cairo, a dynamic tech camp dedicated to inspiring the next generation of innovators through FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics. Over the course of 7 days, we worked tirelessly alongside a talented group of children, dedicating 8 hours each day to teaching them how to build and program robots for FTC competitions.

Tech Trek: Cairo was designed to ignite curiosity and creativity in young minds by immersing them in the exciting world of robotics. During our time at the camp, we guided the participants through various aspects of FTC robotics, from the fundamentals of mechanical design to the intricacies of coding and autonomous systems. The camp provided a hands-on learning environment where kids could experiment, problem-solve, and collaborate on building robots that will compete in next year’s FTC events.

The experience was incredibly rewarding as we witnessed the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the participants. Their eagerness to learn and their innovative approach to robotics were truly inspiring. It was an honor to be part of a team dedicated to nurturing these future tech leaders and preparing them for the challenges and opportunities of competitive robotics.

Reflecting on this experience, we’re grateful for the chance to contribute to such a meaningful program and to connect with a diverse group of young robotics enthusiasts from across the world. We’re excited to see how these bright young minds will apply their newfound skills and creativity as they prepare for their upcoming FTC competition. 

Our second year in Egypt had a lot of differences from our first year. One big difference was our new Arduino course for our ever-expanding demand for students around the world to learn. Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices.

Creating an all-new Arduino game was challenging, requiring creativity and innovation. The goal of the game is to touch down a lunar lander while dealing with random anomalies. The lunar lander will be lowered by two strings allowing the speed and tilt of the lander to be adjusted. Students will be scored based on their landing speed, distance from the target landing zone, and ability to react to the anomalies. Anomalies will be random and each anomaly will have different consequences. Students will be given a list of the anomalies ahead of time so they can adequately prepare and innovate solutions to the problems.

Although we had many obstacles in our 5 day journey, we are able to overcome our problems and taught them an entire new coding language in under a week. We are very proud on what our students were able to achieve and all of them had a wonderful time with us. It was an honor to teach them and we hope we can see them in the future, possibly with a third trip back to Cairo.

One of the sub-sections of this hackathon was a comprehensive game design challenge. The students used the pico-8 game design software, an introductory software that allows students to design their own games using Lua. This comprehensive game design software allows students to design their sprites, and even sound effects, and music. 

The base purpose of this camp was to host lessons and teach students how to design their own games and then at the end of the week we hosted a competition where the students were given specific awards based on the award they best embodied. Over the week, the lessons consisted of graphics, music, and the basics of game development. Each day the students would learn something new from the lessons and then incorporate the specific learnings into their games. Towards the end of the week, many students were able to include some very cool features into their games. 

At the end of the week, we had a fun time judging each of the student’s games and seeing their improvement throughout the week. Not only did we teach the students, but we also learned a lot and the mix of cultures made for the learning experience a unique one for everyone who participated in our camp! At the end we handed out 5 awards which we handed out to each group which they were very happy with.