Tuesday, February 23, 2010

02/22/10

To start off, I let them finish up the questions from our previous session. Afterwards, we discussed the motor subsystem of the VEX robot including functionality and possible issues that may arise. Following that I gave the students the remaining time to work on the protobot which, after two 30 min sessions, is about 10% complete.

02/10/10

Today, I did not have access to the robotics equipment (it was locked away somewhere) so the students and I spent some time doing book work. We talked about the basics of the "Engineering Design" process (ie taking a problem and devising solutions on paper
before building).

To simulate this I pretended to be a client hiring the group to build a robot. As the client I asked them to create a rough drawing of their robot, explain its functions and give me an estimated cost. After they completed this exercise, they worked individually answering questions about a hypothetical "room cleaing" robot.