When I took over the classroom… the room was an a mess, and my materials were split between it and another room in an entirely different building.

Here are some of the places where I found robot parts scattered the first day. Before I realized I had another room somewhere in the school with more materials.

For the longest time I had a large “salvage yard” on one side of the room where I placed any container of jumbled parts and any robot builds that I found.  It had container after container of mixed parts, partially built robots, and a lot of hazardous broken parts.  I spent months going through them with gloves so I wouldn’t cut myself, sorting out the dangerously parts and possibly recoverable parts from the good ones. Just about every time I thought I was done, I would find more boxes either behind something in the room, or in the other classroom. 

Thankfully, for previous stocks of small parts, my wife helped out A LOT with sorting. This gave me and the students a head start when organizing parts later, having some form of organization to start from.

I also had many sealed and partially opened boxes of the updated robot parts to match the current curriculum. Each box contained layers of packaging that I had to keep sorting into more and more specific parts in various “kits.” This often included mixes of parts that could often be found in different types of kits, not just having things sorted by part type for easy stocking.

For new parts I enlisted the help of my students in unpackaging and sorting parts. There were way too many parts for one person to do solo.

After months of work during and after school, and talking some people into providing funding for storage containers, I now have most of the parts organized into three cabinets.

If that seems like I skipped a lot of intermediate photos… I did. Trust me, there was a LOT of sorting, re-sorting, searching for obscure parts, and building some additional shelving out of excess robot parts from the old curriculum.

I’m still working on some labelling, but this is finally usable! The students and I can find the parts now. I’m not longer having to frantically dig through still sealed boxes or tubs of potentially dangerous parts to find the parts that the manuals call for.

Now my students are actually able to build on a regular basis, and I get to see actually functional and in-progress robots on a regular basis!

There is still a salvage yard, but it is ONLY 1 TUB now. I also made a better indicator for it now that I have time to decorate. I just may have to add a small sign to it for those who don’t get it. Jawa’s Junkyard? Eh, I’ll workshop it.