Fall SAVY 2019: Day 1 – Robotic Engineering (Grades 5/6)
Dear SAVY parents,
These future programmers and engineers were busy today! We didn’t waste any time diving in to our content today, as we began the day with a discussion of the engineering design process and used it to build our first EV3 robot cars. Students worked with a team and had the freedom to come up with their own designs. There were a wide range of designs and very cool ideas! We then began coding the color sensors to read the colors blue, yellow or red. This was more of a challenge but students are picking up quickly! The end goal is for their robot to follow the line and pick up objects based on a color code.
We then did a short team building activity to help us further develop our collaboration skills. In groups of two the students had to design a bridge that would hold a sphero robot. They were given limited resources and the bridge was one foot above the ground and had to be longer than 20 inches. Many succeeded and some realized they needed to go back to their design to make improvements. Overall it was a great exercise that allowed the students to experience the engineering design process in practice.
In the afternoon we spent some time talking about speed and rotations because the students were introduced to the Sphero. They were given a goal to program the Sphero to complete a square while spinning 360 degrees at each corner. It a was great challenge! Of course everyone wanted the Sphero to be very fast. However, they realized it was much harder for the robot to complete a square when it was moving quickly, so they had to adjust their code. This demonstrated the importance of review and revision in our projects and experiments.
Next Saturday we will spend more time on understanding how to code to the EV3 robots and introduce the touch and distance sensor, which will add yet another layer of complexity.
Have a great week!
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