Start a community robot lab
A room, some kit, and six sessions that other people finish. The hard part is not the robots.
What this is
A Launch capstone where the output is not your project. It is a room where other people build things, and the evidence that they did.
Everything technical here you already have. What is new is that it has to work for people who are not you, on a Tuesday evening, without you being indispensable.
What you need before starting
- Somewhere to run it. A library meeting room, a school lab, a workshop corner, a café back room.
- Enough robotics knowledge to keep people safe around tools and moving parts.
- Six evenings, spread over six weeks. Not six evenings in a row.
What you'll leave with
- A run book somebody else can teach a session from.
- A completion rate — the share of attendees who finished something and took it home.
- A cost per attendee-session, which is the number every funder and venue will ask for.
- A second facilitator who has actually run a session without you in the room.
What this is not
It is not a business plan, and running it is unlikely to make money. If that is the goal, price the work properly first — it is a different course and a different skill.
Six sessions
Set it up, run it, and find out whether it survives you.
- The room and the first project — Pick a build small enough that everybody finishes. Everything else follows from that. (30 min)
- Kit, money, and the first three sessions — What it costs per person, who pays, and what actually happens when twelve strangers arrive. (35 min, paid)
- Does it survive you? — Three more sessions, one of them taught by somebody else, with you not in the room. (30 min, paid)