Robotics Resources

Here are resources for people looking to teach robotics, especially those who came to my presentation at the SWATCA teacher’s convention on Hands On Robotics.

Here is a PDF version of my slides; note that is lacks all audio and video clips.

Next Actions

Scratch

Try out Scratch. (Happy Scratch Day in Canada today).

Also take a look at ScratchEd, a site for people teaching children to use Scratch.

If you’d like to try something more advanced, look at Build Your Own Blocks. (You might also like these interactive books on BYOB-based programming languages).

Mailing List

Sign up for the Robotics In Education mailing list.

SABRE Games

Come to the 2013 SABRE Games, next Thursday (Feb 28, 2013). (Come to watch; or bring some young roboticists to participate!)

Make Magic

If you have a LEGO Mindstorms NXT set, try out Enchanting.

Check It Out

There are some great books in the Jim and Mary Kearl Library of Cardston that you can sign out easily from your local Chinook Arch library (and ought to be able to get via inter-library loan from any public library in Alberta, or perhaps Canada).

[There are a great many other excellent books on robotics; check out an online bookstore near you.]

Listen

Listen to some great podcasts.

• Robotics For Teacher’s Podcast
• Interview with Chris Rogers of Tufts

Watch

Here are some interesting videos.

• Mitch Resnick: Reading, Writing, and Programming
• Chris Rogers: Teaching STEM with a Camera and a Brick or Two
• Frank Noschese: Learning Science by Doing Science
• Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers
• Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

Keep In Touch

Here are my contact details.

You can also follow me on Twitter — @ClintonWB.

I also run a mailing list called SABRE Announcements. You can sign up on the left.

Additional Resources

Websites

• LUMACS – outreach program at the U of L that does robotics.

• The NXT Step (This is the premier blog on the NXT).

• NXTPrograms has fabulous building instructions for all three NXT kits.

• Stem Robotics 101 “is both a turn-key curriculum for novice Robotics teachers and a collaboration tool for veteran Robotics teachers.”

• LEGO Engineering has a number of robotics-related activities, and it run by Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach.

• Kids Engineer! has some great curricular resources, interesting blog articles, and aims “[t]o understand and promote engineering education in elementary schools.”

• MindBoards is a forum where you can ask your questions. (Enchanting also has a forum).

• The Make magazine blog is very interesting, and the Brother’s Brick is lots of fun.

• Here is LEGO’s official page for LEGO Mindstorms.

• For more advanced robotics, take a look at BotBench and RJMcNamara .

Competitions and Events

• I run the SABRE games locally.

• With other groups, we’ve run Robofest locally for several years.

• Calgary hosts the Western Canadian Robotics Games every May, and they meet every Saturday at the Aerospace Museum.

• Do be sure to check out the Mini Maker Faire in Calgary next year.

• FIRST Alberta run events like the FIRST LEGO League (FLL), Jr. FLL, FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition — with an event for every age range.

• NAIT is running a VEX competition.

• The Western Canada RoboCup Jr. event runs in Kelowna every year.

(There are lots and lots of other events, and it is easy to host your own).

Presentation

• Robotics Through Inquiry (with materials from AISI Learning Leaders in Calgary)

Radical Idea

• Designing 20% time in education

Papers

• Scratch and 21st Century Skills

• Learning By Designing

• All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten

• New Pathways Into Robotics

• Also see the LifeLong Kindergarten Group ‘s homepage.

• Students do not overcome conceptual difficulties after solving 1000 traditional problems

• Focus On Inquiry (by Alberta Education)

PD Courses

• Logo Summer Institute 2013 in New York, July 8-12.

• 2Learn.ca has also offered courses on robotics.

Where To Buy

• Educational kits can be ordered through Spectrum Educational Supplies. (You might also check out LEGO Education, but they do not sell outside of the USA).

• Retail kits can be purchased from many places, such as RobotShop.ca, Amazon, Target, Toys R Us, and from LEGO directly.

• Parts are best purchased at BrickLink or eBay.

If you are looking for interesting sensors, check out

• Mindsensors
• HiTechnic
• Dexter Industries

Other Interesting Technologies

Just a short list — as there are so many!

• Arduino – an easily programmable microcontroller
• Raspberry Pi – a $35 computer designed for kids to explore programming.
• VEX – a more advanced robotics kit.
• fischertechnik – an alternative robotics system.

Mindstorms Is Different

Brian Davis asked, at The NXT STEP blog, Should LEGO make sure you can build everything? Go read his post (and the other comments); my summary will not do it justice. In brief, he asks, “Lego Mindstorm’s owners are upset that the new NXT set does not let them build the same things they could with the first set. No one gets upset that when you buy one Star Wars set, you can’t (necessarily) build something that requires a different set. Is Mindstorms somehow different from other LEGO kits?”

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Mindstorms is different, especially the NXT. (As a minor point, when you buy an RCX, even an adult can tell that it is LEGO, and can use it with any existing LEGO they have; with the NXT, people say, “That’s made out of LEGO?”)

When you buy a Star Wars set, you buy 1) the ability to build the model(s) on the box, and 2) parts, with which you can build anything you can imagine.

When you buy a Mindstorms set, you buy 1) a robotics invention system — a versatile toolkit for building robots. The models on the box show that you can do something with it, but you don’t buy the kit to build them — you build them to understand how to use the kit. The set is not purchased for parts, but because the parts do something. It does whatever you can think of to make it do.

And herein lies a problem. Using LEGO Mindstorms is really, really hard! Even when you can decide what you want to make, putting the pieces together in such a fashion as to bring the idea to fruition is difficult. But that’s only half the challenge. Now you need to make it do something. Unfortunately, the target audience doesn’t know how to program, and their parents aren’t prepared to help. [And then, if you know how to make your program, you have to fight against buggy software. Ugh!]

Symour Papert, author of “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” spoke of how, if you want to learn French, you should go to France. If you want to learn math, you should visit ‘Mathland’ [refering to the idea of using computational power to provide engaging environments in which it is natural to pick up new concepts and apply them.]

In the same way that a language is a toolkit of words, grammar, and syntax that enables communication, the NXT set is a toolkit of bricks, construction techniques, and programming that allow you to create robots. Languages drift over time; Old Slavic becomes Russian and Ukranian. Here we have a sudden drift of the parts in the NXT set, and a budding roboticist, like a toddler learning to speak, does not know enough of his own set (or language) to be able to benefit from instruction written for a different set — it might as well be in a different language. It has been said that the US and Britain are “two nations separated by a common language”. The same can now be said of owners of the different NXT sets.

Back to ‘Math Land’ — the doors to ‘NXT Land’ have been opened wide. Authors and netizens have drawn maps that guide the way through the territories (or ‘exploration space’) of what can be done with the set. Then LEGO, instead of enlarging the borders of the land, changes them, rendering whole continents out of bounds to new roboticists (while, admittedly, creating new terriries that the guides are busy mapping.) It is frustrating, as a robotics teacher, that my students can not do the same things with their toolkit that I can with mine, and that the resources that have been invaluable to me are valueless to them. They don’t have the parts, they aren’t about to figure out how to use BrickLink (and don’t have a credit card anyways), and their parents, after fessing up $350 for a robotics kit, aren’t about to spend an additional $100 for, say, the NXT Educational Resource kit.

One more example: Regular LEGO sets are like computer applications. You crunch data in your spreadsheet, draw a picture in your artwork program, and use the results of both in your word processor, which you can then e-mail to someone or print off. The tools all work together, and if you have more tools, you can do more things. In contrast, the Mindstorms set is the platform — a computer, an operating system, and a suite of built-in applications (and a rich home for third party applications). Now, the computer platform is changing all the time, but great effort is taken to maintain backwards compatability, so that you can use different computers and still perform all the tasks that you expect to be able to do. What LEGO has done is broken backwards compatability—imagine what would’ve happened if they’d changed the size and spacing of the holes through the bricks—and the platform isn’t nearly as useful as it would’ve been if it could still do — out of the box — everything that it did for someone who bought it two years earlier.

Mindstorms is more than just a construction set; it is a toolkit for building robots. While you can battle the Dark Side with any number of Star Wars sets, you cannot apply hands-on learning from a master craftsman when you are missing a tool he uses.