Romanian Robotics

Monthly archives for March, 2012

Romanian Robots (and students) going to the FIRST Tech World Championships in St Louis!

Mar29
2012 2 Comments Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

The 2nd Annual Eastern European FIRST Tech Challenge Championships were held at the the American International School of Bucharest on March 23rd and 24th. 12 teams from 8 different countries participated in the tournament where students build and program robots for a game which changes every year. This year’s game is called Bowled Over! Multiple Romanian TV stations covered the event and the national station TVR’s interview of one of the Romanian robotics team can be seen at http://www.tvr.ro/articol.php?id=122774 To see more photos and videos of the event go to http://sms.aisb.ro/aisbtv/ceesarobotics.htm The event results can be seen at the main tournament website http://web.me.com/deanhester/CEESAFTCRoboticsTournament/Home.html In 4 weeks the captain team of the winning alliance, AISB’s DracuBots, and the Inspire award winning team from High School Nicolae Balcescu will be traveling to St Louis, Missouri in the United States to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championships!

 

Posted in Robotics Competition

Flattening the Robo Sitter Unit: Course 1 Project

Mar11
2012 3 Comments Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

The emphasis of course 1 for the COETAIL program is to use the internet as a collaborative tool by having students create and respond to blog posts. For my end of course 1 project I have decided to update a project that I gave my high school robotics class in the fall for my current middle school robotics class by adding a collaborative element using the internet.

My middle school students will be required to complete the Middle Years Program (MYP) design folder components of Investigate, Design, Plan, Create and Evaluate as part of their Mindstorms NXT robo dog sitter design project. The design cycle stages of Design and Plan require students to seek feedback on their proposed robot designs and timeline before proceeding to the Create stage.

In the high school robotics class last semester I asked students to get informal feedback on their Design and Plan stages in the classroom from their peers. With the middle school class I will be formalizing the feedback process by having them register for the Flat Classroom Project. Students will then post their design and timelines to the internet so their classmates can leave comments as feedback. Hopefully MYP tech students in other schools will also see the design plans and timelines and leave their feedback in comments.

The unit plan below follows the International Baccalaureate MYP Unit Planner so it is a bit lengthy. It also contains the required Approaches to Learning skills with collaboration being an approach discussed in the COETAIL course 1. The embedded file is a PDF file as our ATLAS unit planning software will not export an editable Word friendly document.

If you cannot see the embedded document because you do not have the correct browser plug-in go to https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B0e2a3JVS1aSbG5CRW83bWRTMTJBWUpvMnlZUnA3Zw to download the pdf file directly.

 

Posted in Robotics Classroom, Social Media in Education

Circling back to circles

Mar05
2012 1 Comment Avatar of dhester Written by dhester

Last week I had an experience of how a math lesson could be so much more authentic than a traditional textbook math lesson as I taught my robotics class.

As  Dan Meyer points out in his TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlvKWEvKSi8) many current math textbooks make the problem solving process too easy and unrepresentative of using math in the “real world” to solve problems. For years I have been using Geometer’s Sketchpad (http://www.keypress.com/x24070.xml), Fathom (http://www.keypress.com/x5656.xml), LoggerPro (http://www.vernier.com/products/software/lp/)  and Autograph (http://www.autograph-math.com/) as software tools for students to use in constructing their own math discoveries. In one lesson students used LoggerPro to analyze videos of water balloon launches and determine the quadratic equation whose graph would match a parabolic ballon trajectory. They used their analysis to determine the best angle to launch a water ballon at to maximize the distance flown. To test their analysis I became their target at the maximum distance they calculated.

When I design lessons to encourage what  Dan Meyer calls “patient problem solving” I usually start with the math concept I am trying to teach and then brainstorm different real world problems where knowing that concept would help to solve the problem. Recently I realized the best math lessons might come from starting with the problem first.

Last week my students in middle school robotics had to calculate the degrees the wheel of their robot must turn in order to make the robot execute a 90 degree, 60 degree or 30 degree swing turn. They quickly realized they were dealing with 2 circles; the wheel’s circle and the turning circle. Students then determined that by using the ratio of the circumferences of the two circles they could calculate the number of degrees the wheel must turn in order to make a given degree swing turn. The best part of this real world problem solving math lesson is they did not have to ask me if they got it right. All they had to do was run their program that they designed with their calculations to see if they got the correct turn from the robot.

So the next time I teach the circumference formula in my math class I might just get the robots out!

 

Posted in Robotics Classroom, Technology for the Math Classroom

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