Wednesday 25 March 2015

A Lesson in Ballistics?

You parents can be very proud of your children because they have completed building the most complex robots from the Lego set instructions. I was not sure at the beginning, but they've made it through.

The students built the robots themselves and I was only involved in settling disputes regarding borrowing of some Lego pieces between the teams.

A huge thanks to Jackie who saw an opportunity to teach children the right way to share the pieces (as opposed to "steal" them).




It just happened that all robots include an attachment to "spit" or shoot Lego plastic balls.

Initially I thought we would just use the shooters to write programs that will teach how to use sensors. For example, the robot cruises around, senses an obstacle, gives a warning, then shoots.

But now I think we can spend at least one entire session on some experiments in ballistics and projectiles. Let's measure angles, distances, ball weights and shooting power and draw some charts.

Like this one:




Oh now, sorry, I meant this one:




Nah, let's just do this one:

2 comments:

  1. Awesome - they'll be studying Napoleon's battle tactics soon enough! Looks like they are very proud of their efforts :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow, very cool! Much appreciated. Just looking at those angles makes my head hurt! Thank you Suzanne

    ReplyDelete