{"id":10841,"date":"2015-11-23T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T01:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/?p=10841"},"modified":"2017-12-14T12:35:07","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T01:35:07","slug":"a-week-in-the-life-9-walk-this-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/a-week-in-the-life-9-walk-this-way\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in the Life #9: Walk This Way…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I teach an introductory course using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. My students are 7th graders who are required to take the course and may not necessarily have any background in programming\/building. My school is on a trimester schedule so the course runs for thirteen weeks at a time. For this particular trimester I have one class of twenty-four students and one class of thirty-four students. I meet each class for one 50-minute period each day, five days a week. I have thirty-four computers in my classroom and one EV3 kit for every two students. I\u2019ve been teaching this class in its current form for two years, though I\u2019ve been teaching Robotics for eight all together.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Walk this way, this way…”<\/p>\n

You’re either of an age where the above quote references Young Frankenstein, Aerosmith, or Run-DMC. Some of the robots my students created during this week move like Marty Feldman or Steven Tyler or some combination of both. I explained in A Week in the Life#8<\/a> how I wanted to teach my students to use linkages to make their robots move. During this second week of the unit I didn’t really add much new in terms of what I taught to my students, so the rest of this post will be a running commentary on the videos showing their successes and failures.<\/p>\n

Even after a week of explanation and instruction there are sill some students who don’t get it. To what extent this is a failure on my part or theirs is a philosophical discussion for another day, but here’s one of the results I had:<\/p>\n