LEGO Mindstorms Robots (Week 7)

Robotics provide opportunities for students to engage in a range of creative problem solving activities in many areas of the curriculum including mathematics, science and information technology.






During the Kelvin Grove Student Robotic workshops I witnessed the many benefits of incorporating robotics into the middle primary school setting:
  • Student Engagement is high during lessons ( the need for behaviour management is minimised )
  • Group cooperative learning takes place ( I heard students discussing what role they would take on in the next lesson ie. programmer, tester )
  • Oral language development in maths/science ( through group discussions )
  • Programming/ICT skills are developed within a constructivist environment.  Students were challenged to move from a 2D programming environment to find real world solutions in 3D.  For example, students had to work out what variables they needed to change in the program to make the robot change direction (right or left) on the '3D lego table'.

A number of resources are readily available for teachers to adapt for their own classrooms.  One set of resources can be found at the Educational Origami wiki site:
The portfolio task for this week was to design a program to support the suggested activity stated in the blog post.  Although this task is simple it gives an example of how Lego robotics can be creatively incorporated into a range of activities across the curriculum.

Students could incorporate a LEGO robotics activity into a school road safety campaign. By changing the power of the robot students could investigate and graph the relationship between power (deceleration/braking) and distance travelled. An integrated (Maths/SOSE) assessment task could be to create a short video on road safety incorporating a video clip of the LEGO robotics in action.

The following screen shots illustrate the steps taken to program the robot:

The Mindstorms Screen:

Step 1:  Program robot to move forward in a straight line for 5 seconds, power icon at 75.



  Step 2: Program robot to move forward in a straight line for 4 seconds, power icon at 65.





    Step 3:  Program robot to move forward in a striaght line for 5 seconds, power icon at 55.



    Step 4:  Program robot to move forward in a straight line for 5 seconds, power icon at 45.




    Step 5:  Program the robot to move forward in a straight line for 5 seconds, power icon at 35 (note 5 icons now appear on the main screen)