{"id":10145,"date":"2015-04-14T22:15:47","date_gmt":"2015-04-14T12:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/?p=10145"},"modified":"2016-02-10T10:01:38","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T23:01:38","slug":"the-gbc-debacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/the-gbc-debacle\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in the Life #0: The GBC Debacle"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first of probably fourteen posts, each chronicling in detail the ins and outs of my Robotics class. I teach an introductory course using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set. My students are 7th graders who are required to take the course and may not necessarily have any background in programming\/building. My school is on a trimester schedule so the course runs for thirteen weeks at a time. For this particular trimester I have one class of twenty-four students and one class of thirty-four students. I meet each class for one 50-minute period each day, five days a week. I have thirty-four computers in my classroom and one EV3 kit for every two students. I’ve been teaching this class in its current form for two years, though I’ve been teaching Robotics for eight all together.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

For my first post in this series I’m starting with the final week of my class from last trimester because it didn’t turn out well and I’m hoping that it goes better when I do the same project this time around. I have always wanted to do the Great Ball Contraption (GBC) in class, but thirteen weeks is a short time period and it’s hard to fit in new projects.<\/p>\n

I went wrong from the start with this one.\u00a0I began by showing the students some of the wonderful GBC videos out there, like this one:<\/p>\n