Hello all,
So I really haven;t been using these forums all too much but I really want to start so here is #1 of a couple threads that I wanted to start.
Our team is in its second year, but our school’s principle loves us so much (sarcasm) she decided to create a robotics class for our high school’s attached middle school. My coach and I are responsible for teaching 7th graders how to program and build functional Mindstorms robots. So far its been interesting… especially since we don’t actually have any kits (the money is held up in the district so we just decided to buy the kits with our team’s own money) and I’ve been trying to teach the kids programming with index cards.
I was wondering if anyone had good suggestions for the class especially in regards to projects, things to teach (because I am running out of ideas, I just taught them the last part of programming), and activities to help them build team work skills?
Depending on the exposure the students have already had to engineering, I would start with teaching the engineering design process. Even though it isn’t as necessary in FLL as it is with the bigger robots, the earlier you can drill it into their heads the better off they’ll be when they (presumably) join your FRC team in a few years.
In college, I was a summer camp counselor where robotics was an activity. (Found that job off of ChiefDelphi, believe it or not.) We’d only get about five or six hours of time in a two-week session with the kids–four hour-and-change sessions, plus some wiggle room on rehearsal night. So it wasn’t nearly as deep as any FLL or class program would go, but it did teach me a thing or two about creating a rewarding process:
Hardware first. We were using RCXs back then, and it was always much easier to wow with a robot that was mechanically done but needing the IR remote to move rather than a brave little toaster with exceptional software and sensors.
Design challenges that scale up. The best one I did was the last one, where the kids had to design a robot that could drive forward and hang from a pull-up bar. Once they got that, I had them automate it (the bar sat on white poster board with a black line under the bar). That let the kids that were really clicking keep going while the ones that struggled a bit more could keep grinding on the hardware part. (That ran the clock out, but if they had figured that out then I might’ve made them drive back, then maybe add a turn in the mix, then…you get the picture.)
Don’t fear the booklet. Two of those robots (the two nearest the camera) used drive bases straight out of the Constructapedia that came with the RCX kit.
I’d get in touch with an FLL team or the affiliate partner in your area–you might be able to finagle some old mission sets that would yield a lot of new challenges. (Heck, we ran a full season and didn’t touch half of the missions last year!)
But even if the principal just dumped it on you, look on the bright side: this is your pipeline. Make the best of it!
i know your feeling exactly, the best way i found is to come up with a path and have a set or requirement and have each student program a different way to get through the path using sensors and everything
This can be quite a blessing in disguise. All three of the World Champion teams from 2013 have active FLL or Lego robotics programs feeding into their FRC programs. It is quite likely that your Lego robotics related activities will make your future Chairman’s Award submissions stronger.
First off I have a couple questions:
Are you using the LEGO Mindstorm, or the Mindstrom EV3. The programming for the two, though similar, is different. The EV3 more closely resembles LabView.
Are you only concerned about programming or the overall construction and programming?
Do you have an practice mats to utilize to help with programming? There are multiple sites for mats, and you may be able to talk an FLL team out of an old mat (though getting a complete mission set is harder to do, as the LEGOS get reused).
I have seen note cards be used to show how the links go together, before the actual programming is done.
Have fun, and let the kids fail every now and then, they learn best by their own mistakes.
For my mindstorms classes my teacher drew labrinths, basically we had to program our rem bot to go from point 1 to point 2. Every challenge got harder and harder, such as more turns, or like sircular paths so i had to steer turn. It was drawn on cardboard
Wow, thanks everyone for your suggestions! I really had a good time reading them!
OK it seems that the “overarching” idea that you are all saying is that I should work up, meaning start simple and get more complex. To answer a few of your questions:
Are you using the LEGO Mindstorm, or the Mindstrom EV3.
We are using EV3 because they don’t sell NXT anymore…
Are you only concerned about programming or the overall construction and programming?
Well, both programming and construction, but I find that teaching construction is easier through having the kids learn through trial and error. Programming is something you need to teach actively rather than passively. Don’t you agree?
Carnegie Mellon has offered high quality NXT-based teaching curriculum for many years now. They now offer EV3-based curriculum too.
Yup, yup I’ve seen this curriculum and tried it the first couple of classes, but unfortunately, the kids are not really behaved enough to follow said curriculum… Order is difficult because most of these kids suffer from ADD/ADHD.
Lastly, I came up with this idea last night as I was falling asleep:
STEP 1: Teach programming
STEP 2: Build a single robot for the kids myself and have them all program it in teams
STEP 3: Create a single program and have the kids build a robot around that program
STEP 4: Wrap it all up by having the kids make a robot from scratch!
We barely have any money and the nearest FTC team was just started this year so we really can’t help us with providing us with a past mat.
Again thanks for all your help looking forward to some more suggestions and help!
I suspect you’ll find the programming tutorials at www.stemcentric.com a great place to start. We have all of our MS students complete those exercises before going on to other challenges.
Team 1710 does a small event every so often where we have the kids come in and design robots to compete in a mini-game with very simple tasks. Instead of starting with the programming, we teach them how to operate the bot with the LEGO mindstorms app. This lets them understand the basics of how the motors work. If you have any specific questions feel free to PM me. We’ve been doing these camps for a while and can probably help you out if you need it.
Based the experience my younger son and I are having this year mentoring two FLL teams, students with ADD/ADHD can make it much tougher for all involved. It may help to keep the groups small to minimize their disruptive influences on each other.
At the camps my sons teach each summer, they have the students build a “5 minute bot”. They teach them how to implement a line follower (draw on some white paper with a black marker pen). They then have them solve some of the simpler challenges on an FLL mat. Most of the students can do this in about 15 hours total.
I just finished a Mindstorms class, albeit with younger students, and I found that using robot sumo as a final activity really engaged the kids and gave to possibility for both simple solutions and lots of iteration.
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.
I second the idea of using pre-built robots if you are teaching a class of random kids, some who want to be there and some who don’t. Our 7th grade science unit that I teach only lasts 3 weeks so we start with standard robots with two touch sensors and a light sensor. The students then spend the first week going though the STEMcentric tutorial, getting checked off for each challenge they complete. Then we dive into a custom mission to Mars challenge that’s roughly similar to an FLL mat but optimized to be more about software and less about mechanics. That’s because we just have one class worth of robots but those are shared by four MS classes. Students can make mechanical changes to the robots if they like but they have to be simple enough that they can undo them by the end of the period.
The students grade for the unit is based on the score they get at the end on the mat.
Thank you so much for your feedback, you’ve come up with ideas that I would have not thought of!
Here’s what I’ve come up with from the various comments. Tell me how you think it would fly.
Over the years, I’ve found that starting with pre-built robots and giving the kids little programming challenges using different sensors works well.
That’s what I thought to do for at least a couple months until they mastered programming. So I think I will be sticking to the four step process that I mentioned before. I like the idea of introducing each sensor to the robot sequentially as like a way to learn each one of them one by one.
The students grade for the unit is based on the score they get at the end on the mat.
We were wondering how we would administer a “mid-term exam and final exam grade” and I like your idea of testing how well a robot completes the task. Unfortunately we cannot grade the entire class this way as we need to count behavior and completion of hw assignments too.
just finished a Mindstorms class, albeit with younger students, and I found that using robot sumo as a final activity really engaged the kids and gave to possibility for both simple solutions and lots of iteration.
I like the idea of a sumo robot. So basically the robots are trying to push each other out of the ring? Autonomously or tele-op?
I am trying to make a final curriculum right now. Maybe I’ll post it after I am done to get your input.
One last thing is now our team was invited to help organize and teach a TETRIX course at the local Police Athletic League. I was wondering what control system is best: Arduino or Mindstorms?
I haven’t ever used an arduino to control a Tetrix kit, but I have used the mindstorms and I know that it is very well integrated because that is the official set up used in FTC. RobotC for Tetrix+mindstorms also generally just works without much fiddling, which is nice.
We were wondering how we would administer a “mid-term exam and final exam grade” and I like your idea of testing how well a robot completes the task. Unfortunately we cannot grade the entire class this way as we need to count behavior and completion of hw assignments too.
I’d propose you have a series of challenges, not necessarily related to one another, with points available for each one. Students would then optimize their grade by picking which challenges to do. Your midterm grades would then be a snapshot of where they were at that point. You could also make it clear that effort and behavior count for X%.
Not sure why you’d do homework since this is such a self-paced hands-on class. If you really had to do so I guess they could write reports, create brochures or do presentations on some robotics/engineering topic.
Not sure why you’d do homework since this is such a self-paced hands-on class. If you really had to do so I guess they could write reports, create brochures or do presentations on some robotics/engineering topic.
I agree Homework is useless, but the principal made herself clear that there needs to be assignments given as it is still a graded class. So far I’ve just given them assignments to complete little logic worksheets at home.
I haven’t ever used an arduino to control a Tetrix kit, but I have used the mindstorms and I know that it is very well integrated because that is the official set up used in FTC. RobotC for Tetrix+mindstorms also generally just works without much fiddling, which is nice.
It’s pretty easy and more cost effective (Arduino - $25, Brick - $410). Plus you can use LabView for Arduino which is similar to the LEGO IDE.
