Robotics Homeroom Ideas

[suewanninger]

The school that sponsors Team 1732 offers two forty-five minute 'specialty' homeroom periods each week. Students have the option of taking a study hall or signing up for a homeroom for the entire year. Topics are diverse, including student government, history, chess, table tennis, photography, movie-making, and many others. Activities vary, but for the most part they are very laid back and homeroom members can choose whether to participate, work on homework, etc. While some homerooms limit membership to 'club' or 'team' members and handle club business during homeroom time (i.e. only debate team members can be in debate homeroom), the robotics homeroom (in its second year) does not.

Last year, team members worked with the non-members to build Vex robots for a mini-competition, but everyone found that the 25-30 minutes they had to work on the bots just wasn't enough time and was very frustrating. So we're looking for activities that can be broken down into 25-30 minute increments the the team might offer to homeroom members to keep them interested (maybe enough to join the team!) All activities need to be organized and directed by the four or five team members in the homeroom, as the faculty moderator is simply there to supervise. Any ideas out there?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Pavan Dave]

FLL hands down.

It is very 'clean' (not that much time set up and take down and not very messy) and is fun. My team mentors at Elementary schools during the FLL season and many times, after the kids are gone, we mess around and try to do the challenge ourself. It takes us about 30 minutes to build and program a robot (using RoboLab) and it requires some teamwork. If possible, maybe even after a month or so of building, you could have a mini-competition between the different teams (5-10 people per team works very well).

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Write a children's book?* Work on a newsletter? Design your own game, rules and all, then present it in a white paper here on CD. That would be interesting.


I'm not quite sure of much anything else...


*I tried that once, faile to say the least.

[DCA Fan]

We spent our homeroom class time organizing our FLL event, fundraising, and doing general administrative work. On season, the time is used for Chairman's writing, programming, and small tinkering with the robot.

[suewanninger]

Thanks for the ideas! I really like the Mindstorms idea and now have to ponder where we'll get funding for a few NXT kits!

I know that members of the robotics team will have no trouble at all finding things to do in homeroom, but really would like to get the 'newbies' engaged somehow. Mindstorms might do the trick!

Thanks everyone.

[artdutra04]

Being the kind of person who likes to work their their hands (as opposed to doing administrative paperwork), I'd say keep the Vex robots, and if you do get some NXT kits, use them as well. But before I could offer more substantial advice, I'd like to know if this 'homeroom' idea is for the entire year?

25-30 minutes of work per day may be frustrating, but 25 minutes on two of five days per week ends up being 30 hours for the entire school year. For me personally, this would be enough time to build two complete (and complex) Vex robots, with still more than enough time left over to compete.

I'd say your best bet (with Vex or NXT) would be to set up extremely simple challenges. Don't even make them a game, just a challenge. Use electrical tape on the white linoneum floors to make a crazy line-following course. (A 'figure eight' makes it even better!) Have them autonomously try to make a robot that can navigate the room without hitting anything using ultrasonic sensors.

Keep the projects (on the robot construction and programming end) simple, but enough to introduce students into the world of robotics. A Vex Squarebot (with the addition of a multitude of sensors) is perfect for this. If they need to create arms, manipulators, etc. then it's probably too complex for your time limits.

[EHaskins]

I think NXT/RCX would be a good option, but I would also suggest you keep the Vex.

There are a lot of people who here Lego, and think they're too old. If you keep the Vex you still have something for the people interested in robotics, who won't use Lego.

Just my $0.02.

[Eugenia Gabrielov]

I like the idea of small challenges, but let me suggest something that might tie the semester together a bit more.

Start with a simple goal - one that can be completed in a 25 min period with the square bots (following a line? etc). The next week...add something to it to make it interesting. So on and so forth, until it becomes more complicated but gradually so that students aren't going insane about it. Now and then take breaks from progress on that to teach other lessons. A couple examples:

* 1 day of CAD or other training - could develop into more if there is interest

* A simple, non course related challenge, a la "who can make the slowest robot" (teaches gear ratios, stuff like that)

* Introducing one week where teams work separately on robots that complete different tasks, or on different arms and options, and then present them to others briefly in a demo

My main reason for suggesting this progression is that it gives students a feeling of progress, of having fun while watching what we learn unfold in front of our own eyes. Instead of starting from scratch every week, you give non-robotics kids a chance to gain skills slowly. Also, robotics team members will get a feel for introducing different topics and finding out what teaching styles work best. They can even write plans, or something similar, which is really useful for the season.

Sounds like you've got something great here good luck,