My students (almost) created an unmanned robotic drone for delivering messages to the main office.
Robot with iPhone attachment.
The robotics students have put together their first robots and are trying out the software for making them move. Lego has a new app that allows you to use your iPhone or iPad as a remote control, and my kids love it. They’ve got a robot fighting competition going on using them as remotes. I, however, wanting to push them into actually programming the robots for autonomous motion, told them I wanted them to get the robot to deliver a message to the front office without them following it through the building.
Well, this was their solution:
They attached an iPhone to one of their robot with the camera facing out. They then connected made a video call to that phone using another phone and the FaceTime app. Since the two phones were busy communicating with each other, the robot was operated using the wireless, Bluetooth connection via someone else’s iPad.
It worked. More or less. The robot lost the Bluetooth connection at the end of the hall, so the robot could not make it all the way to the office.
So now they’re actually trying to write a program. Although I finally got them to do what I wanted, I have to say I was impressed with their innovative use of technology.
Aerial robots are used to construct a tower. It’s pretty awesome, especially when you note that the robots don’t collide with each other, and plug themselves in when they realize they’re running out of power.
There was a neat little conference today, organized by LEGO’s Education division. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to include robotics in my math and science classes, but since I haven’t had the time to delve into it, I was wondering if the LEGO Robotics sets would be an easy way to get started. It turns out that they have a lot of lesson plans and curricula available that are geared for kids all the way from elementary to high school, so I’m seriously considering giving it a try.
Pedagogically, there are a lot of good reasons to integrate robotics into our classes, particularly as the cornerstone of a project-based-learning curriculum.
The act of building robots increases engagement in learning. Just like assembling Ikea furniture makes people like it better, when students build something the accomplishment means more to them.
Working on projects builds grit, because no good project can succeed without some obstacles that need to be overcome. Success comes through perseverance. Good projects build character.
The process of building robots provides a sequence of potential “figure it out” moments because of the all steps that go into it, especially when students get ambitious about their projects. And students learn a whole lot more when they discover things on their own.
Projects don’t instill the same stress to perform as do tests. Students learn that learning is a process where you use your strengths and supplement your weaknesses to achieve a goal. They learn that their worth is more than the value of an exam.
Projects promote creativity, not kill it like a lot of traditional education.
In terms of the curriculum, Physics and Math applications are the most obvious: think about combining electronics and simple machines, and moving robots around the room for geometry. A number of the presenters, Matthew Collier and Don Mugan for example, advocate for using it across the curriculum. Mugan calls it transdisciplinary education, where the engineering project is central to all the subjects (in English class students do research and write reports about their projects).
I’ve always favored this type of learning (Somewhat in the Air is a great example), but one has to watch out to make sure that you’re covering all the required topics for a particular subject. Going into one thing in depth usually means you have to sacrifice, for the moment at least, some width. The more you can get free of the strictures of traditional schooling the better, because then you don’t have to make sure you hit all the topics on the physics curriculum in the seemingly short year that you officially teach physics.
The key rules about implementation that I gleaned from presentations and conversations with teachers who use the LEGO robotics are that:
Journaling is essential. Students are going to learn a lot more if they have to plan out what they want to do, and how to do it, in a journal instead of just using trial-and-error playing with the robots.
Promote peer-teaching. I advocate peer teaching every chance I get; teaching is the best way to learn something yourself.
2 kids per kit. I heard this over and over again. There are ways of making larger groups work, but none are ideal.
A Plan of Action
So I’m going to try to start with the MINDSTORM educational kit, but this requires getting the standard programming software separately. One alternative would be to go with the retail kit, which is the same price and has the software (although I don’t know if anything else is missing).
I think, however, I’ll try to get the more advanced LabVIEW software that seems to be used usually for the high school projects that use the more sophisticated TETRIX parts but the same microcontroller brick as the MINDSTORM sets. LabVIEW might be a little trickier to learn, but it’s based on the program used by engineers on the job. Middle and high students should be able to handle it. But we’ll see.
Since LabVIEW is more powerful, it should ease the transition when I do upgrade to the TETRIX robots.
The one potential problem that came up, that actually affects both software packages, is that they work great for linear learners, but students with a more random access memory will likely have a harder time.
At any rate, not I have to find a MINDSTORM set to play with. Since I’m cheap I’ll start by asking around the school. Rumor has it that there was once a robotics club, so maybe someone has a set sitting around that I can burrow. We’ll see.
The kits come with a micro-controller, a few motors and some sensors. While there are quite a number of ways of assembling these to make robots, the ones at the science center were pre-built except that you could just plug in a bulldozer or sweeper attachment (and a head which was purely decorative). This limited the degrees of freedom to three, which made it easier to program something useful in the hour we had with the robots.
The programming is very basic. There are two sets of instructions, one to control the movement of the robot in general, and one to control its response when the sensor detected a change in the environment. The objective of the science center’s game was to clear off a set of objects from a white rectangle within five minutes.
You could tell the robot to move forward, back or rotate while it’s on the board and to activate its sweeper or shovel. So a full program could have just five elements; general: lower shovel –> move forward –> rotate; sensor: move backward –> rotate. With these strict limitations, the programming interface is also very simple; you plug in blocks with each instruction in the series for either the general movement or the sensor reaction. With all this simplification, I’m not sure just how much the students learned about programming from our short session.
The full kit from Lego offers more freedom to design robots and thus more flexibility with the programming interface so with a little thought it could be easily integrated into the curriculum. At about $300 each the system is a bit pricy, we’d probably need to get one kit for each small group of 3-4 kids. They would probably be worth it however if we used them more than just once.
I’ve been playing with the Basic Stamp micro-controller for a while, and while it offers almost infinite flexibility, making it more useful for practical applications, it does not provide the immediate gratification of the robots, and the ease of assembly to make it the better tool for introducing robotics to middle schoolers. I still, however, tend to favor practical applications, so perhaps I can persuade a student to do an advanced project to build an automatic window for the greenhouse.
The session at the Science Center was worthwhile. All of the students seemed to enjoy it. It provided a nice integration of the mechanics and electronics we’ve been learning about all year, and a glimpse of where technology is taking us in the future.
