4-h robotics Curriculum Lego Mindstorm nxt robot
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- 4-H Robotics Curriculum Lego Mindstorm NXT Robot
- 4-H Robotics Curriculum TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction – page 2
- LESSON 4 – page 29
- Building STEM and Teamwork Skills with the LEGO Mindstorm NXT Robot LEARNING MODULES
- FOR 4-H Volunteer Leaders WITH NEW KITS
- LESSON 1: Building Teamwork in a Team of Youth
- Activities/ Challenges Find Your Twin
- Be The Bot Activity –Retrieve an object
- Note to Adult Leader or Mentor
- Be The Bot Activity-Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
| Seilstad, David O, Regional 4-H Youth Development Specialist,
Iowa State University  
4-H Robotics Curriculum 
Lego Mindstorm NXT Robot Building STEM and Teamwork Skills with the LEARNING MODULES Prepared August 2014
4-H Robotics Curriculum TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction – page 2
LESSON 1 – page 9 Building Teamwork in a Team of Youth LESSON 2 – page 14 So What’s in the Tubs? LESSON 3 – page 23 Let’s Get the Robot Moving LESSON 4 – page 29 Let’s Turn the Robot LESSON 5 – page 37 Avoidance using Sensors LESSON 6 – page 41 What Kinds of Jobs do Robots Do? And Switching on the Light Sensor LESSON 7 – page 46 Programming a Switch for your Robot to Follow a Line LESSON 8 – page 49 Learning to Work with GEARs Appendix Appendix 1 – page 52: Preparing your Team to Work with Robot Challenges Appendix 2 – page 54: Team Building Activities Appendix 3 – page 55: SUMO Robot Challenges in Building and Programming This Curriculum and all of the resource pieces referred to in the curriculum are all posted on the Harrison County Extension Office Website: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/harrison/news/4hbeginningroboticsnxt
Robots are a great way to help youth learn engineering, math, programming and teamwork as youth work together to build, program and adapt their robot to accomplish challenges you initially provide for the team. Shortly into the process, you will be providing them the opportunities to access the tools and resources to create their own process of discovery. Whether you are a classroom teacher, adult volunteer with a youth organization, or an involved parent, you will find the discoveries that teams make in working with their LEGO Mindstorm Robot help to nurture a youth’s problem solving skills and help them to appreciate the sharing of responsibilities and talents of their team as they work together. Youth at middle and early high school ages are often used to problem solving on their own in working with technology and must learn the importance and the fulfillment of working with others to come up with ways to accomplish the challenges given to the group in working with their robot. As they find their strengths and talents in the group, they will find that cooperating instead of competing is such a rewarding part of the engineering and technology world. They can accomplish so much more in working as a group than any of them individually. The robotics program is the path that they travel down in learning these important life lessons that will serve them well in any STEM career. To be successful in using robots as a teaching tool, the youth need to learn:
You will find that this curriculum combines lessons in teamwork with the lessons to learn about building and programming the LEGO Mindstorm NXT Robot to create a successful set of STEM Skills. It is also built on a pattern of discovery for the youth you work with. You will find very quickly that the youth in your program will go beyond what you know about the robot building and programming and you will be more of a facilitator of their learning and helping them to apply what they have learned to new challenges. Author’s Note: Because youth robotics programs are so successful in upper elementary and middle school STEM programming, and the primary robot platform that you will find being used is the LEGO Mindstorm NXT, you will find a very welcoming network of resources available to you on the web to use with your youth. You will feel instantly welcome to this wonderful supportive network of youth and adults working with the NXT and any youth robotics programs like FIRST LEGO League or local robotics programs being taught in the school and after-school. This includes the creative youth that are participants in these programs, who are more than willing to work with your program and share what they know. It also includes the many formal educators—teachers, and informal educators—volunteers working with 4-H, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and afterschool programs who have shared resources on the web. It is a wonderful community to connect with and they will all share that working with youth and robotics is one of the most rewarding experiences that they have had in working with STEM programming and youth. They will tell you that you just need to share a small foundation of knowledge and then the youth are off and learning with each other as they discover more and more about working with the robots through their own interests and interacting with some of the learning resources on the web. It really comes down to the youth learning problem solving and figuring out how to build and program their robot to solve challenges and complete challenge tasks. Feel free to also contribute or help improve these lessons through what you learn or find as additional resources as you create or adapt resources and are willing to share. FOR 4-H Volunteer Leaders WITH NEW KITS: The LEGO Mindstorm NXT Educational Kits, includes two tubs, a grey 979797 NXT Education Robot Base Set Kit tub and a blue 979695 NXT Education Resource Set tub. You will need to do some setup following receiving the kit to get ready for youth to build a robot and attachments.
It’s Not Rocket Science: Keep it Simple! Check out this webpage for confidence on LEGO engineering. FROM DAMIEN KEE, A LEADER IN TEACHING ROBOTICS: “The word ‘robotics’ can be a little intimidating to a teacher new to the field. I constantly encounter teachers who have been thrust unsuspectingly into the role of the ‘robotics teacher’ simply because they were in the staff room at the time the Principal was looking for a volunteer. They hear the words ‘robotics’ and ‘programming’ and are immediately filled with dread. But while it is possible to use robotics to create amazingly complex creations, we often overlook the fantastic array of simple and educationally effective activities we can do.” The following is a range of activities you can run in class using just a single Block in NXT-G, the ‘Move’ Block 
With this block we can get the robot to move based on the following parameters
At this website, you’ll find four great starter activities in challenging your 4-H Robotics Team. Key Online Resources So you are excited to lead a group of youth through Robotics Discovery Learning… As a leader/teacher of a group of youth who will be going on the journey with you building, programming and meeting challenges with the LEGO Mindstorm Robot, there are several online resources you should plan on using to get you and your youth started. Some you need to go through a simple process of registering to access and others are available without registering. The registration process is simple and at no cost with minimal info shared and opens a wider set of resources than would be available through the public unregistered part of the website. You might want to register now to be able to have the resources available to you later on in the curriculum.
LESSON 1: Building Teamwork in a Team of Youth For many of you, the youth that you will be working with “know” each other. That loosely translates into them going to school together, but do they really know and appreciate what they and their teammates bring to the team. A process of getting to know each other to share their strengths that they have to contribute to the team is a process of discovery as important as the robot building and programming skills that they will learn. Engineers must work together closely communicating as they go, in developing new products and designing all of the components that go into the finished product. All of them need to learn the principles of building and programming, but some of them might have a real passion and endurance for adjusting robot build designs or spending hours working on the programming to have the robot complete a task, or communicating and marketing their work and solutions to others which is very important to a team. Most importantly, they may know what they do well, but discovering and appreciating their teammates for what they do well is critical to working as a team. SO the process of building a team out of individual youth working together is an important part of the HyperStream Club experience.
You will then work with the group to have some fun in making sounds for the bus taking off and the bus stopping at the next stop on the field trip. Have the group choose a sound to make for the bus accelerating and then give them a choice of sound for the brakes as the bus stops at the field trip stop. I usually give them a choice between air brakes with a “cushing” sound or screeching brakes with a “screech” sound. Then have them all join in to make the acceleration noise for the bus taking off and the brake sound choice for their field trip stop and announce the choices, “Out the right side of the bus to……” and “Out the left side of the bus to…..” They may not stay on the bus or straddle the bus in a desire to do both. They must make a choice. Continue through the starting and stopping sounds of the bus and announcing each Field Trip stop choice. Playdough Pictionary Supplies: You will need a container of Playdough and a set of index cards with the objects written on them for team members to form out of Playdough for the rest of the group to guess. The list of objects to put on index cards and activity description are in the Team Building Activities folder. Activity Instructions: If you have a small group, you can have them all participate in one group and if you have a larger group of youth, you can have groups of four or five each complete the Playdough Pictionary process through forming the object on the card with Playdough so that their group guesses what it is. This is not a competitive event as each group will go until their group guesses the object. They may not use the Playdough to spell out the letters of the object on the card. If a team member gets stuck, they can say STOP and ask one other group member to go off to the side to tell them what it is that they are trying to make out of Playdough and they can come up with a plan to make out of Playdough to help the group guess the object. Be The Bot Activity –Retrieve an object Supplies: 1 sheet of paper and pencil per group of 2 or 3 youth A water bottle or other prop that the robot must retrieve and bring back to the group. The resource sheet for this activity can be found in the Team Building Activities folder. Activity Instructions: In this activity for Be the Bot, you will divide the team into groups of two or three, where one of them will be the robot and the other one or two members must write down in a list format the exact instructions for their robot to go from sitting to retrieving a water bottle or other prop from somewhere in the room. They will learn how precise and complete the instructions must be for a robot to complete a task or challenge. When they have completed recording their instructions, it is time for them to either give the instructions line by line to their robot and have the robot complete the instructions only doing exactly what the instructions list. This may take some reminding of the robot that they can only do “EXACTLY” what the instructions tell them to do. An extra element that you can add to this activity is to have groups exchange their line by line BE the BOT instructions that they recorded with another group to test the program and see if it takes them to their goal object (Thanks to Merry Barney, Underwood MS for this suggestion. Her instruction and line by line programming form is included in the resources for this activity. Using another group’s instructions sometimes allows the group to be very honest in only executing the instructions given.) Note to Adult Leader or Mentor: You will need to help the team be as specific as possible in giving instructions to their robot. You may have to stop them if they have omitted or assumed an action without specific instructions. This is not meant to be a frustrating activity, but it is very important to help them see how precise their instructions to their robot must be in how much to turn (in degrees and direction) or the specific instructions that it would take for their hand to reach out and grab something to retrieve it…many steps are involved in how to extend the arm, to open the hand, but how much? And how to get the hand to grip the bottle and not crush it or let it slip out of the hand. Just be a reminder that they need to be specific as best they can to help them be precise in their instructions, since the robot person can see and would have picked up an object in their hands before, but now specific instructions must direct their actions. Be The Bot Activity-Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich Supplies: A piece of paper and pencil, plastic knife and paper plate for each group of 2 or 3 students, loaf of bread, jar of peanut butter, jar of jelly for group. The resource sheet for this activity can be found in the Team Building Activities folder. Activity Instructions: In this activity for Be the Bot, you will divide the team into groups of two or three and they as a group must write out the exact instructions for one of them to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then one of the team members will serve as the sandwich making robot and complete each of the steps in the instructions to complete the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The adult leader must make sure that only the instructions that are given will be followed to complete the sandwich making process. If any step or detail in a step is left out, the team must stop and go back to their seats and add any instructions that are missing before coming up and trying the sandwich making process again. They may leave a sandwich in progress and resume their sandwich making process when they have completed writing down any omitted instructions for their robot. The teams will be done when the sandwich is completed, and they may divide and eat the sandwich if the process was completed in a food safe manor. Note to Adult Leader or Mentor: You will need to help the team be as specific as possible in giving instructions to their robot. You may have to stop them if they have omitted or assumed an action without specific instructions. This is not meant to be a frustrating activity, but it is very important to help them see how precise their instructions to their robot must be in how to open a jar…many steps are involved in how to extend the arm, to open the hand, but how much? And how does one grip the knife and spread the peanut butter or jelly on the bread? Just be a reminder that they need to be specific as best you can to help them be precise in their instructions, since the robot person can see and would have picked up an object in their hands before, but now specific instructions must direct their actions. Two Really important videos to show after your Be the Bot Activity: If you have time to show these two videos at the end of the Be the Bot or at the beginning of your working time together with the youth, they are very foundational to understanding programming robots for teams:
http://www.education.rec.ri.cmu.edu/previews/nxt_products/robotics_eng_vol_2/preview/content/process.html Download 207.01 Kb. Share with your friends:
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