I recently ran a simple challenge that I called the “6 Tile Challenge” that worked well in my classes and got the point across that you should calculate the number of rotations before you drive your robot. This was the second day of robotics programming for my classes and we...
With all the available STEM options, we often get asked Why Robotics? So here are some quick thoughts to kickstart your thirty second elevator speech for robotics program support. See what you think. I like educational robots because they make abstract concepts real. With this opening salvo, and depending on your primary expertise and...
Design, construct and program a car to run for varying lengths of time. The distances that the car travels should be recorded and plotted on a graph to determine how long the car will need to travel in order to make it stop as close as possible to a randomly...
I’ve often wanted to see greater educational use of LEGO robots more in alignment with how robots get used in the real world – taking on that dull, dirty, dangerous, or distant task. One approach could be to measure an area, map the features, and then conduct missions based on...
Pendulums are one of the earliest machines we see and Physics courses can take advantage of that familiarity to reveal fundamental principles and demonstrate the mathematical relationships. In this demonstration, I suspended an NXT with three sensors from above, and let it swing back and forth, recording the data via...