I looked online to see if Lego has education resources and discovered that it’s education partner is Tufts University. That’s nearby. I also know Katie Juelich who was a student at Tufts and worked on Lego Education there. I’m going to see if I can talk to somebody there for aid in doing this afterschool program (even if it’s just direction). I also need to talk to Ed Harrow who did a robotics program at Touchstone and at Grafton, MA, elementary schools with robotics kits. (He didn’t use Mindstorm, so there wasn’t much programming, but there was a lot of engineering discussion.) So, much to do…
I looked for a bit into robotics competitions. The closest thing I could find for kids in the elementary age range was Jr. First Lego League: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/jfll/default.aspx?id=818
Any others you know about?
8
Nov
Well Sophia is not really thrilled about the Mindstorms software.
We installed it on the machine and watched the videos. She liked that. Then, we went to the first programming task for the Shooter Bot. Make the robot go forward and backward five rotations.
The environment is really much more complicated that the controls on the brick, and programming it in that environment shows the problem. On the brick, she had already figured this out and made this program on her own. But when she was doing it in the software environment. It was completely foreign and not intuitive. The movement blocks have a TON of options. It reminds me of other dialogs on visual programming environments that will go nameless (suffice it to say that I was surprised it was missing options to set the sample time and datatype). In any case, she lost patience after the second step, because she had to change two things on the dialog and couldn’t find the two options among the many that were there, and she said in frustration, “I’ll just go do it on the robot OK?!” I had to agree it was easier. I think this programming environment is going to be tough to get the kids into. The first example for the Shooter Bot was completely blah, and I’m wondering if there is another environment that is easier to use. (I thought this used Scratch - which Sophia really likes - I’m shocked it’s this complicated.)
Here is Sophia with her thoughts on playing with Lego Mindstorms:
“I built a robot, and then programmed it on the NXT, which was my favorite part about doing it. Right when my Mom brought the NXT out, I clicked on the first button I saw. I used a bunch of sensors. Once the lighting/color sensor didn’t see the light, because the port was hooked up wrong. And you Mommy told me that it didn’t matter! I am going to do it right now. Bye!”
Artwork by Sophia
I am starting this blog as part of a project I’m undertaking to teach kids about programming and robotics. Today we started with the Getting Started part of Mindstorms. Hmmm, I hated how we had the step-by-step instructions for building, and then it completely dropped off. No, step-by-step instructions for programming something cool? That was disappointing. Luckily, we figured it out. We put on the touch sensor and used the programming on the NXT unit to create a simple program.