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Unread 21-11-2014, 12:18
Michelle692 Michelle692 is offline
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FRC #4904 (Bot-Provoking)
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Re: Middle School Mindstorms Class Help

In addition to coaching FLL teams, I teach a Lego robotics class to the entire 5th grade. Over the years, I've found that starting with pre-built robots and giving the kids little programming challenges using different sensors works well. I then give them another motor and they have to design and build an arm mechanism to retrieve a ball, and we just attach the arm motor to the robot. This allows for some instruction around building, but does not require the same attention span or frustration threshold to build a whole robot from scratch. Similar to what others suggested, I then just make it harder as they complete tasks - first, the ball is a fixed distance from the robot, then they have to automate using different sensors (first color or distance, then put the ball at the end of a line and do line-following, etc). If there are kids who really want to build the robot from scratch, I ask what they want to change about the current design and then let them.

Depending on the interest of the students, I also try to start each day with a video of a real robot that uses whatever I'm teaching that day. For example, when we use the touch sensor and programming loops to have the robot try to escape from an enclosure, I show a video of the Roomba vacuum cleaner because it does exactly the same thing (move until it hits something, turn, move until it hits something). This can sometimes offer more motivation for why we're doing something, and to show how it can apply in the real world.
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