{"id":10766,"date":"2015-10-26T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T01:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/?p=10766"},"modified":"2016-02-10T08:46:40","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T21:46:40","slug":"a-week-in-the-life-7-sensor-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/a-week-in-the-life-7-sensor-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in the Life #7: Sensor Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the eighth of probably fourteen<\/del> in a series of 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\u2019ve been teaching this class in its current form for two years, though I\u2019ve been teaching Robotics for eight all together.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you have been following my “A Week in the Life” series, you may have noticed that my class in the trimester I’ve been chronicling has leaned more heavily towards mechanical engineering than programming. Upon reflection (good teachers reflect, right?) I’m not sure why that is. It could be because the activities I’ve found the most challenging and fun lean that way, it could be because my personal strengths are more in building than programming or a few other reasons. I know when my introductory class was a twenty week semester instead of a thirteen week trimester as it is now I had more time for programming and I’m pretty sure the difficulties I chronicled in #4<\/a> also had something to do with it.<\/p>\n

So that leads us to a quick and simple unit wherein I taught thresholds<\/a> and some basic programming techniques with a little twist that stumped some of my students. The following picture of my whiteboard wall says a lot about what we did this week:<\/p>\n

\"Threshold\"<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I began by having my students write a number line on the whiteboard tables (there’s always one group that interprets “a number line from 1-10” as meaning to write every single whole number in between!). On the tables, I have blue tape strips (and if I haven’t already said it, colored electrical tape is a Robotics teachers’ best friend). The students will use the color\/light sensor in reflected light mode<\/em> to get a reading for the white table and the blue tape and to write those down on the number line.<\/p>\n

The first challenge we are working towards is having robots drive forward and stop on a colored line different than the surface color. The two videos below show an unsuccessful and a successful run some teachers did during a training session from a few years ago. For whatever reason, I didn’t take as many pictures and videos in class this week so I’m digging through the archives to find ones that line up.<\/p>\n