Over the last four class periods students have been working on building and constructing their Lego Mindstorm Robots. We started with a manual to build a basic robot to give them a starting point. I had set up some very simple obstacles to teach them the very basics such as programming the robot to movie forward, backwards, and three types of turns. Once students proved mastery of these concepts I built the Lego board that we used for the First Lego League competition. There are a variety of challenges and difficulties for students to try and solve. Here is the first glimpse of students actually putting to practice their skills.
To build and program these robots requires a ton of teamwork, problem solving, and engineering skills. Students have to come up with an idea and plan to execute. They then have to build the idea to make the robot work. Next, they have to program the robot using software on the computer to make it move on its own. Finally, they test their ideas to see if it works. If no successful, then they must analyze the problem, come up with a new idea and try again.
We are off to an excellent start.
I will continue to document their journey as we progress with this project for a few more weeks.
You can follow their progress over at http://coffeechugcontraptions.wikispaces.com/
Leave a Reply