IdolHands.com :: Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek
Growing Minds Robotics Laboratory
As I noted earlier, Lydia and I have been working with my LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit. We're starting out simple, building some of the models that are recommended in the book that comes with the kit. But since I've augmented my collection of parts with some neat stuff from the online catalog for LEGO's educational division, we have all the parts that we need for more complex robots as we move on.
In addition to being a lot of fun for both of us, I'm seeing a lot of learning opportunities for Lydia with these projects: the ability to read a diagram (e.g. instructions), visual-spacial skills (parsing a 3D drawing and understanding its relationship to the parts in her hand, fine motor skills, mechanics, electronics, logic, problem solving... Robotics is really a rich field for learning.
Our first robot was BumperBot, an obstacle-avoiding robot. The first version had a single bumper attached to a touch sensor, and it was programmed to back up and turn when it struck an obstacle. Since we have a Roomba that has pretty much the same behavior, I even made BumperBot play Roomba's "uh-oh" sound when it hits something.
We then upgraded the bot to have two sensors, so that it could react differently based on whether it hit something with its left bumper, right bumper, or both bumpers.
Next we're going to integrate a light sensor. We can use it for echo-location, line-following, light-chasing, and dark-seeking behaviors. I'll post pictures and write about it when we're done!
More pictures of our robotics projects are posted on Flickr. |
