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A set of ten classes to teach principals of robotics to middle-school children:
Back in 2000 I got ambitious and decided to teach a robotics class at my son's school. This was 6th grade,
in retrospect 7th or 8th grade might have been a better choice but who knew? At any rate I owned several sets of
Lego Mindstorms® Robotics and a bunch of old laptop computers
from my job so I thought, "how much work could it be to teach this after school to the handfull of kids that
would want to do it?" Like all such undertakings it took on a life of it's own and I realize in retrospect that I should have been better
prepared for it. Having said that I did get through about 10 lessons which boiled down to about 1-2 hours
one night a week after school.
A couple of things you should keep in mind if you think you're interested
in doing something like this: Firstly I used revision 1.5 of Mindstorms, I think they're on 2.0 at this point. That shouldn't
change too much of this but will impact communications and other procedures for how you download and
almost certainly will change what the programming interface looks like? You may have to adjust some of the screen
captures and presentation where programming is taught. Secondly, I leaned heavily on the book:
Dave Baum's Definitive Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS". Most of the bot's are right out of this book so if
you're going to do this, YOU REALLY NEED TO BUY THIS BOOK.
Or better yet, buy his first AND second edition since it's got updated features. I can't stress that enough,
the word doc's are basically a more atomic, step by step approach but the book is invaluable
because it has a lot of background information you'll need to do this so don't try and save the
$30. It'll be the cheapest part of the whole endeavour trust me.
Ok so with that out of the way I should mention how I went about teaching this. Each class has a
power point and basically this would give some talking points to review with the kids; some knowledge
to sneak into the whole thing. Depending on the presentation I discovered (and you'll find this in the later classes) that
a bit of talk and then construction seems to work best. Having said that, the overall approach probably
works better with somewhat older kids, if you're teaching those under 7th grade you'll want to pare back the
presentations a lot since they'll get too bored. We organized the classes into groups of 3 students each. Fortunately
(thank you EBay)
I was able to get enough Mindstorms kits to allow them to work in these small teams. This makes it easy to
have one child fetching parts, another assembling them, and the other reading instructions and checking
his/her work against the pictures. Make the group too large and they don't get the hands on experience, make
it too small and some kids can get overwhelmed and fall behind, at least that was my experience.
One last note: To create the drawings that went into the doc's I basically assembled everything
myself first in MLCad. This is a fantastic, free, full 3D computer
aided design program that is oriented entirely around LEGO's. The parts are there, you just assemble them!
The picture at the top is a POVRay trace of one of the assemblies I did... I think I had as
much fun teaching this as they did doing it.
If you do decide to use these materials to teach your own after school course be sure to
drop me a line and let me know how it went... Perhaps
you can do what we did and offer those who've completed the course a day of
"battle bots"... To do this, create about a 8' square out of wood and have teams design and build their
own attack robot. This seems to appeal probably more to the boys than girls but it was fun and it gives
them the opportunity to draw on all they learned, which turned out to be more than I had anticipated!
Here's one that we drew up with the intent of driving around the arena and just tipping over other people's
robots (simple is often the best approach)... last one standing was after all the winner.
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