How do robots think (and what does this have to with a guy from Doncaster)?
Robolympics is a summer Year 8 expedition.
The learning targets were :
- I can use a range of mathematical principles to convert a set of coordinates into bearings and distances
- I can identify the factors that have contributed to the success of my team
- I can develop the design of a robot for a specific purpose
- I can use Boolean operators to program a robot for a specific purpose
Students were challenged to follow a set of bearings and distances on the large car park, and discovered this traced out the shape of Wall-E. They read about George Boole who was a teacher’s assistant in Doncaster and a mathematician who wrote about the laws of logic, which are the fundamental laws in all modern day computers. Students played games with logic gates such as AND, OR, NAND, NOR and XOR to work out how inputs changed their output, learning how to express these using Boolean algebra and Venn diagrams.
When the guiding question and learning targets were revealed students discovered that they would be working with robots, which had been purchased for us by a range of sponsors from companies around Doncaster.
As a team students managed the project themselves, choosing which parts of the VEX curriculum they needed and working within the specific roles of Project Manager, Robot Designer and Robot Programer. They checked in with their line managers regularly to report on their progress.
For the challenges, students worked in teams of 3, each with their own robot. The first challenge involved programming their robot to move between a set of coordinates. However, the robots do not understand coordinates so they had to use Pythagoras’ theorem and trigonometry to work out the bearings and distance between each coordinate point. Students then had to work out how to program their robot to follow this path accurately and as quickly as possible. Teams were awarded bonus time for the second challenge based upon how successful they were.
The second challenge was a game called Highrise. In this game students had to both manually control and program their robots to automatically collect and stack blocks of specific colours. They had a certain amount of time to complete the challenge, including our bonus time from the first challenge.
In the celebration of learning, we invited our business sponsors and families to our tournament where teams competed against each other in the highrise challenge. The winning teams from Skipper and Admiral will be entered into the national competition later next year.
