{"id":11551,"date":"2016-06-28T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T23:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/?p=11551"},"modified":"2017-02-23T16:18:19","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T05:18:19","slug":"a-week-in-the-life-11-sumobot-to-battlebot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/legoeng.local\/a-week-in-the-life-11-sumobot-to-battlebot\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in the Life #11: Sumobot to Battlebot"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 thirty-two\u00a0students 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

One of the highlights of my class – as far as my students are concerned – has always been the Sumobot competition. With\u00a0almost universal buy-in, they gleefully build and program robots to battle each other and knock their opponent out of the ring and into oblivion. Yet as I continually orchestrated this final unit, I found it was lacking. Lacking in sophistication, difficulty, solid building principles, etc.<\/p>\n

While sometimes I get a cool result like this one where the students employed technique and strategy:<\/p>\n