Love Legos? Love Robots? Learn elementary and advanced computer programming – mazes and other challenges will be solved by programming the robots. Visit the most famous robot in the real world: the Mars Rover.
There are three goals for the students in our Programming robots group: 1) Students will be able to get some sense of programming through hand on activities such as connecting the laptop and the robot, checking the sensor, and getting the robot moving toward the desired path and/or the pre-set destination. Students will hopefully enjoy the process and solve problems by trial and error on their own or with some level of assistant from Richard. 2) Students will be learning some TI 84 basic programming. They will learn to write some basic and fun programs as well as some useful programs applied in Math. Hopefully, they will be able to check the limitations of some programs and try to overcome those limitations to make the particular program works for all situations. 3) Through correcting mistakes and errors, students will either learn some observation and analysis skills or enhance those skills if they already have developed ones.
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| Schedule: | Activity | Aim/Intended Learning Outcome | Practicum Experience and Out of School Trips | Multimedia Component | Writing Component | Targeted Skills |
| Oct 26 Mon |
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Students will be exposed to the basic essential parts of the robots. They will be experencing three basic moves of the robots and getting the robots to perform some desire moves to get to the pre-set destination. | Robots will be connected to the laptops so that students will be able to run the program namely BricxCommandCenter. | Students will be taking notes of the errors they have made and how they have had been able to correct those errors. After the reflection in the whole group, each student will write down a paragraph of what was happening and what they learned. | Observational skills. | |
| Oct 27 Tue |
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Students will be able to improve the program on the robots and get the robots to move and turn under different circumstances. Students will also be able to understand some concepts in TI 84 basic programming. They should be able to use “if then else” to write some sort of simple programs. We also expect that students will get a better understanding on the loops namely the while loop and the lable and goto loop. | Students will use their own TI 84 calculators if they have one. If not, ET will give out calculators for them to use. ET will need to connect his laptop which has the TI SmartView installed with the projector so that he can show the programs to the whole class. | Students will be taking notes of the errors they have made and how they have had been able to correct those errors. After the reflection in the whole group, each student will write down a paragraph of what was happening and what they learned. | Observational and analytical skills. | |
| Oct 28 Wed | E.T will take attendance and pick up lunch bags by 9:15. The whole group will be leaving school by 9:30. It is expected that students will have lunch by 11:30 and will starts to leave NY Hall of Science by 2:20pm. | Students will have the opportunity to see the real robot__the Rover from Mars with six wheels and the solar panels. Students were also exposed to researches of posisible life in the universe as well as have some fun time playing with the mirror images and making the colorful fragiled balls from soap liquid. | See and control the Rover from Mars. Watch the real show of the dry ice reaction. Experience the extorted images. | students write one or two paragraphs about what they saw or learned from the trip. | ||
| Oct 29 Thurs | Ti84 programming: simplify radicals. Solve the King Arthur problem. Continue programing robots. Plan for presentation on Friday. | Students will have the opportunity to test the program so see whether it works or not. And if not, what is the problem and how can we fix the problems? | TI84, Ti 84 Smartview, and Robots. | observational skills. | ||
| Oct 30 Fri | TI84 competition: Every student is to enter number 1 to 60 into L1 (list 1). The first 3 fastest students will compete with ET. Then ET will show the whole group how to write a program to generate a list of natural numbers up to certain number. After that ET will show how to use a formula to generate list 2 based on list 1. Richard will show his robot how it moves following the black tape curve. Richard will also give out the whole program so that students can study on their own. | Students will be seeing the real and practical meaning of programming. | TI84, Ti 84 Smartview, and Robots. | Observational and analytical skills. |
STUDENT REFLECTIONS:
Ella: This week I wrote a program which made my robot (Bessie) follow or “chase” a beam of infrared light. In my code I created a global variable called MAX which represented the maximum light intake. I then programmed Bessie to, if the light intake was less than MAX turn and look for MAX by first turning right and then left. Here I encountered a problem because Bessie would turn only left and never right. I tried out several solutions befor realizing that the answer lay in an “If,Else” statement. Now Bessie slowly but successfully follows the light.
Helena: One thing that I learned from the robotic’s group trip to the Hall of Science is that comets are the reason that we have our oceans on Earth. The comets, which were balls of ice, landed in our oceans and melted, adding more water. I also learned that an ecosystem is pretty hard to keep alive manually. The “Connected Worlds” exhibit was interesting. At school, I learned that it’s a lot harder to program things that I thought it was.
Yui: On 10/28/15 we went to the hall of science to get a hands on experience. We viewed everything from mars rovers to the study of ecosystems. I found the mars rover to be very interesting. Since the rover will we very far away from Earth, a commands to reach from earth to the bot will be deplayed 15-30min. In thw mars rover section, we were able to view the rover from a thri person perspective. Being able to look at the enviroments around the bot made is easy, however we were able to imagine how difficult it would be to program commands though some cameras. I was able to nderstand the great use of pre-programing in space exploration. From Monday-Tuesday, we learned alot about the idea of programing. We were given a sample program which we could modify or use as a templete for our own. Because of this, we were able to create and think of new ideas. I tried to make a robot move into a wall and go back though the use of a touch sensor. I was able to succeed but though many tries. I was able to learn that making a mistake is a good thing as long as you fix and try again to make the mistake into a achievement.
Andrew: Throughout this week I learned how to move my robot. I used many commands that I had no idea what they did. I made a lot of mistakes, but Richard helped resolve these mistakes. This helped me reduce the amount of mistakes because I had knowledge of what I did wrong. This helped my robot turn 180 degrees and come to a full stop once the bumper hit an object. We also went to the Hall of Science, where we learned about the Mars Rover and many more like the ecosystems. This inluenced me to make my own robot one day.
Manuel: In Lego Robotics I learned a new language called “C” and I learned how to use it in programming robots like the “Lego Mindstorm”. I made the robot move in the way I wanted to by using letters, numbers and symbols on a computer. I also learned how to create different kinds of programs on the TI-84 Plus calculator without using a computer.
Tenzin: I learned that if you can see something in a different perspective, it can change the whole image. I also learned that Dalbert is able to break the propeller exhibit. This also shows how frgile some of these exhibits are if someone uses a lot of force on them. Finally, i had learned how to make a baseball travel quicker when throwing it.