Archive for the ‘Homeschooling’ Category

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Warning: Science in Progress

Posted May 20th, 2008 in General Tech & Development, Homeschooling, Personal | Permanent Link

Warning: Science in Progress!

If you know me in the nondigital world, you also know that my family homeschools my daughter. I didn’t know much about homeschooling or the homeschooling community before we started this adventure a few years ago; my exposure had been limited to one cool-but-eccentric family where I grew up and an uber-religious boss in the 90’s. Homeschooling has been great for us, however, and my 11-year-old daughter is learning more history, geography, literature, and Latin than I ever did, even in high school.

One of the great things about my working from home (since leaving my corporate job back in December) is that not only do I get to spend more time with my family in general, but I’m also able to take on some responsibility for Lydia’s science education. For a few months now we’ve been learning the basics of electronics. Over at our homeschooling blog, www.WhatAboutSocialization.com, you can find the first of our video podcasts, entitled “Warning: Science in Progress!”

The first episode shows our first Arduino project. I’m working on the second and third installments now.


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Growing Minds Robotics Laboratory

Posted February 23rd, 2006 in DIY, General Tech & Development, Homeschooling, Personal | Permanent Link

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.
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