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Ship Building
Research
Puppetry Robotics

Day One: Explore the tools.

The first day the students experimented with all of the sensors, gears, pulleys, blocks and the RCX unit. Each group had to make a simple program and download it into the RCX unit. The programming language is all icon-driven (see the example). In the example below, the RCX unit tells the light connected to A to turn on, wait 10 seconds, turn on motor B, wait until the touch sensor bumps something and then turns everything (all three channels, A, B and C) off. This is the level of programming the students did the first day with teacher assistance.

Robolab Program Example

Students acting out their program.

I found it helps if they act it out with a person playing the part of each piece of hardware. This is a group trying to solve a problem with a program. The girl in the pink shirt is the RCX unit, the girl in the white is the lower light sensor, the boy in the brown is the upper light sensor and I'm the two lights. The boy in the grey is the film container (see Job 4 below).

 

 

Day Two: Introduce the problem

Container Loading Machine

 Dock

Problem:

We have to make a machine that will move film containers filled with sand from a loading dock to a ship. Each group will make a robot that will be part of the whole machine. Each robot has a job to do and needs to work with the next part of the machine.

Next... Look at the works from the different jobs:

Job #1 The first robot needs to find out if there is a film container ready to load. It also needs to let all the people around know the whole machine is going to start moving by sounding an alarm.
Job #2 The second robot does most of the transport. It needs to get the film container and move it to the third robot. It should stop once the container reaches the third robot.
Job #3 The third robot makes sure the containers are about the same weight. If the container is empty, the robot should turn on a light. If the container is too heavy, it should turn on a different light.
Job #4

The last robot has to make sure the containers are standing upright. If they are, they should slide the container right to the ship. If the container is tipped over, it should turn on a warning light. It also needs to count the number of containers and stop loading when ten containers have been counted.

 

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