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Week 3 - Car Movement Programming 2/15/08 |
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The last two weeks we have been preparing to have the kids program with ROBOLAB. We had them write their own mini programs by cutting out ROBOLAB icons and pasting them onto a sheet of paper. They then built sturdy cars to be programmed. We were finally ready to get the kids on the computers! This week, we showed the kids where to find the control and tools palettes, how to drag icons onto the screen, and how to connect the icons with the wire tool. We let the kids on the computers to construct the program they made with the cutout icons. Some difficulties they encountered occurred when the RCX’s didn’t have firmware. This means the firmware would have to load onto the RCX before the program they wrote could be downloaded. We found that holding the RCX under a table and trying to keep towers as far away from each other while downloading helped this frustrating process. Another problem is that the RCX’s eat up batteries very quickly, so if you do programming, make sure to bring lots of extra batteries. Once the kids got their program to work, we had them complete the going the distance activity. In this activity, the kids have to program their cars to go a certain distance. This is difficult because ROBOLAB only knows to have a motor go forward for a certain time. This means the kids have to complete this task by trial and error. Only a few kids got this far. Next week, we will have the rest of the kids catch up and have the kids who are done try to figure out how to have the car turn.
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