Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Robotics

Enjoying learning more and more about robotics in general via a variety of robots used in education
  • Lego Mindstorms (LMS) 
    • Training: Dec.08-Jan09 Education class at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien)
    • NXT-G 
      • the graphic language from Lego and National Instruments
    • Lejos  
      • Java on LMS
    • LMS forte  
      • helping develop HW Function Blocks and will develop online tutorial classes
  • KIPR KISS Botball
    • Training: Introduction seminar by Dr. D. Miller (OU)  at (TU Wien)
    • Racket on Botball (side project in progress)
  • BeeBots
    • K-5 via K.North at Piney Point Elem. Houston, TX
    • Like Turtle graphics, but also good for spelling bees
  • Parallax Robots
    • Since RIE2010 on wishlist to learn
      • good to learn basic electronics
      • excellent on-line documentation
      • have a parallel processor

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Sept. 2010 RIE 2010 Article

Utilizing Lego Mindstorms as a Teaching Platform for Industrial Automation 
(C.Oates, A.Zoitl)

  • Presented at Robots in Education 2010 in Bratislava
  • Also chosen for the journal AT&P Plus 2/2010 with selected papers from the conference
Presentation
Demo Videos


RIE 2010 itself
  • Conferences are for networking.
  • Robots from small Parallax Robots to teach electronics to the large ABB Robot arm were presented.
  • Besides experiences teaching, students presented self-made robots, robot arms / cranes to ant like robots. The last day there was contest to see how outdoor robots performed outdoor tasks and travel.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Video Summary

Better videos have been uploaded to YouTube here.

Balancing Segway (NXT-G) with color sensor

  • Example of PID controller with Lego Mindstorms (LMS)
    • Used with Elementary school students
First demos of Lego Mindstorms with IEC61499 and 4DIAC/forte

Balancing Segway (NXT-G) with color sensor

  • Example of PID controller with Lego Mindstorms (LMS)
    • Used with Elementary school students
Videos used in an e-Bible course used in Austrian prison e-course system Telefi

Lego Sock Sorter

  • my first Lego project (team of 3)

 

 

 

 

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Nov. 2009 Hurricane Math

Hurricane Math is final project from Technology in Math. It explores curiosity questions I had after watching Hurricane Katrina, waiting for Hurricane Rita, and watching Ike live via Internet from Austria. 


It is a collection of assignments to be used as a resource when hurricanes are in the news.
It is meant to go beyond typical assignment of- Plot the hurricane track to evaluate the hurricane track. (pre-calculus or calculus)
It main assignment asks the question: 
Are there really more hurricanes now than previously? via statistics.What statistical model do hurricanes fit.
It also looks at How good was the hurricane response given how hard hurricanes are to predict.
And the form of the hurricane spiral. There are additional smaller assignments, whose main purpose is to get students to ask their own curiosity questions.


It requires a spreadsheet tool such as MS Excel or Open Office Calc.
Its main assignment is appropriate for a statistics class, but has other exercises exploring hurricanes mathematically. 




Excerpt from Original email when turned assignment:
It is a collection of exercises.
Start with: HurricaneMath0GoalsOverview.pdf

It was developed with Open Office Calc (Linux), but was briefly tested with Excel (Windows).
Please let me know you have received this.

Most useful new trick I learned this semester was: Putting a graph on top of a picture.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Sept. 2009 CAD-3D Robot

CAD-3d Nano
CAD-3D is an important tool for teaching 3D Geometry concepts. An object can be build using basic 3D objects like an sphere, cylinder, eclipsiod and boxes together with the operations union, intersection and difference  Then objects can be copied, rotated, mirrored and/or shifted. Our end project was to create something like a bridge, building, tractor, device, table setting or whatever we chose to model.


My model was a soccer playing robot named Nano from Aldebaren. Both my universities were in the finals. 
It was UT Austin vs. TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology)

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Feb. 2009 Greenfoot Java Book review

It was fun reviewing Greenfoot book and exercises, which use Greenfoot to teach programming via games. The environment is set-up, so it teaching good object-oriented programming incrementally and by example. The tool itself is clean code.


For an idea of what is in the book see the scenarios.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Jan.2009 Lego Project - sorting socks

Our Lego project for students was to sort socks.
Project documentation (German)
Sorting socks video

One thing we learned was that arranging the socks in a circle made more sense the linear line used to sort numbers.


As part of our training in this class we:
Build a Lego car and used it to:


Follow a circular line using:

  • Lego Mindstorms NXT-G (graphical)
  • Lejos - Java JVM that runs on Lego

so we learned to flash the Lego firmware.


Transverse a maze with wood walls (Lejos)


Learned an introduction to sorting by playing a game where we sorted ourselves by the number assigned us.


Additionally I visited and reported on how Hogg Middle School used/taught computers and specifically Lego robotics. They were contacted because they won at tournaments.
And introduced Mrs. North's elementary students to Lego robotics