LEGO Robotics Halfway Update Winter 2015

We’re halfway through our winter LEGO Robotics classes here at the Bakken Museum, and we’re starting to really get into the meat of what we can do with these robots.  The first week we built them, and learned how to design simple programs right on the robots themselves.  We did some simple challenges at the end of the class like driving the robot in basic shapes, such as a square or a circle.

This last Saturday, we got out the laptops and learned to program our robots with the help of computers.  For this we bumped up the difficulty of the challenges, and the robots had to make their way through a simple maze, or use sensors to either interact with or avoid their surroundings.

For this upcoming Saturday we’re going to learn how to more effectively use the sensors for what we want the robot to do in order to get ready for the big show at the end of class next week.  At the big show, family and friends will be able to see the results of all our work as we demonstrate our skills by having the robots safely drive themselves along a "road" in the morning, and with a sensor-dependent parade in the afternoon.  We’ll give more details on those in another post.

We have another round of our LEGO Robotics class starting up in the spring on April 25^th, so check out the museum’s website for information on how to sign up.  http://www.thebakken.org/youth-programs

Winter Carnival

The winter session of Inventors Club began with a carnival. Set up around the room we had four carnival games set up for the students.

"Hey, wait a minute. There is something in this jar!" BUSTED We were in fact playing crooked carnival games.

Thus began our challenge: Can you design a tool that will help you win the carnival game every time. We even turned the process of solving the challenge into a game.

Each time the students tried out their device, regardless of the results, they got more materials. The game was designed to encourage the students to fail fast when prototyping and try lots of different solutions.

Our students came up with many unique and creative solutions to help them master our crooked carnival games.

Up Next Safety Training!