Programming

It has been a while since my last post on the Lego team. Thanksgiving preempted our normal Thursday session, which would have been our third meeting. I sent out an email with some basic information on the challenges we will be performing and some videos for the kids to review over the break.

Last week, we had our third meeting. I wanted to make sure we got the kids more hands on with the robots so they don't start losing interest, and they've been excited to get started. I split them into two groups. I had one group create a short plan for some movement they wanted the robot to make - drive in a circle or a square, zig zag along a path, etc. Then they would actually program whatever they decided they wanted it to do. In the meantime, I took the other group and showed them around the challenge kit, which had been assembled by one of the other teams. Then the first group told us what they planned and we had them show it off to see if it did what they wanted it to. (Spoiler Alert: It didn't.) Then the second group had a couple minutes to try to fix whatever was wrong with the first group's code. Then we switched, and I showed the challenge kit to the first group and had the second group plan something and program it. One of the groups had planned to have the robot drive in a straight line, turn around 180 degrees, drive back in a straight line to where it started, and repeat that several times. The first time, it ended up drawing more of a star shape, but eventually they were able to tweak it to go straight back and forth.

We also watched another of the STEMCentric videos where he showed some of the other basic blocks using the medium motor or the tank steering. The next video we need to watch is the one on loops, which are important when using sensors to control the motors. We'll get to that soon.