EV3 for me

[Wayne Lang]

Lucky me, my Finance Manager just gave me A$7500 to purchase a 10 pack of EV3 robots plus site license. Adding these to my 5 NXT kits, I now have great resources for a number of my courses (nice poetry). I am really looking forward to Week 2.

I will continue to use my NXT for this course though and adapt my knowledge to the EV3. I am looking forward to unpacking a couple of the boxes Jennifer, but not the 10.

Wayne

[Myra Doughty]

Wow! I am lucky to have just one Lego mindstorm approved in my budget.

[Wayne Lang]

I am lucky that I was aware of another academic who did not want his lab updated. I asked for some of the money and was fortunate that it was at the end of our financial period. Luckily no-one else saw it. If you lived near me Myra, I would loan you some of mine.

Wayne

[Sandra]

We haven't used the Lego Robots before and have bought 3 EV Robots.  Hopefully I will be able to adapt my new knowledge to help with the EV!

 

[Richard Stevenson]

This will be my first introduction to robotics.
My school ordered 8 EV3 robots one week ago.
I am hoping that they arrive by week 2 of this course and that I can apply what I learn to the EV3 robot!

[Ms P.]

Hi Wayne did you introduce this in your curriculum or is it an after school club that you run at your school. I am interested because I teach senior IT and would like to introduce this in the course material, just not sure how to at this stage. regards

 

[Wayne Lang]

Hello Mrs P

I teach pre-service teachers at Griffith University in Brisbane, Au. My students, who will access the robots next semester, are made up of Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) and third year Bachelor of Education students with a Computer Studies major. My Semester 1 curriculum course is focussed on ICT across the curriculum and we use the new National Curriculum, Technologies (attached for you), to be implemented in schools in 2014. The digital technologies strand is the area I am most interested in, it has a strong computational thinking focus. Robotics fit beautifully here as does Scratch. I will also use the robots in semester 2 as a part of my "how to introduce programming to Senior computing students" tutorials. I also use iPads for this section.

Mrs P, perhaps you could start your students with Scratch and then move on to Robotics before you move to coding with another language.

Wayne 

[Damien Kee]

Hi Wayne, nice to see another person from Brisbane! :)

I'm looking forward to this course and the discussion that arises from it.

[Wayne Lang]

Likewise Damien. 

I thought you would be writing this course. The discussion should be great. 

[Ms P.]

Hi Wayne, thanks for your reply. I have stated a robotics club using the Arduino platform, the electronics part is so new to me but the programming not too difficult. I am thinking of changing it to this NXT lego. I looked at scratch, do you think it is better or put it this way, would the teenage students prefer this than The game Maker software to develop games. Sorry I sound so confused, it's just there are so many choices and very little time to learn and prepare. For now I am going to follow this course and see what it does for me. I teach on the Gold Coast and would like if we keep contact to bounce ideas off each other. cheers

[cs4hstatom]

Ms P,

I am one of Dr. Kay's students at Rowan University, so perhaps you will like my perspective. Seeing a robot actually move by programming is what first got me interested in computer science, I really can not think of anything more inspiring. Over the summer
I had the privilege to be a TA for Dr. Kay with highschool students learning to program for the first time. The students were introduced to Scratch and NXT, and they seemed to be equally excited about both. However, most students had a preference, and the split in preferences seemed even.

So which is better? Neither! Perhaps mixing the two is your best bet. Each environment teaches students slightly different methods of thought, and giving them the option should keep more students interested.

Along the lines of Arduino is Raspberry Pi (RPi), a full fledged computer shrunk to a single board only slightly larger than an Arduino for the same price. Some RPi's are even used to teach Scratch!

Like you said, there are many choices out there. Fortunately, there really is no wrong choice as long as your students are becoming interested and engaged. The field changes so quickly and has so much information available for free that your most enthusiastic students are sure to teach themselves even more, you just need to give them that inspiration!

[Damien Kee]

Ms P, as has been mentioned, there is no single *correct* solution.  All those things you mention are fantastic for getting students involved with Science and Technology.

Scratch is awesome because it is free and very easy to use.  There are fantastic resources all over the web that'll help integrate it at just abut any year level.  

Arduinos are awesome as they give kids the chance to see what is actually happening under the hood of most electronics.  The software is very easy to use and there is so much example code already written, that students often just need to pick and choose parts of code that already works,and modify to suit their projects

LEGO Robotics are awesome as it gives kids a chance to see something actually move and interact in real life, not just through on a computer screen.  It is a great way to make real a lot of concepts that can sometimes be difficult to visualise and grasp when they are just equations on a whiteboard.

Regards

Damien Kee

[Ms P.]

Thank you so much Damien, I am following this course and luckily I have a very bright student in my class who is helping me along the way. regards

[myrobostation BG]

The EXPLOR3R is the first robot in The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Discovery Book. It’s a versatile wheeled vehicle that uses sensors to navigate around a room and follow lines. Chapters 1-9 in the book use this vehicle to demonstrate the ins and outs of LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 programming