LEGO Robotics in the Classroom

After attending the 1999 MindFest at the MIT Media Lab, John III and I were inspired to try and teach LEGO Robotics in his 3rd Grade class, which is part of our district's gifted learning program. We had to beef up our Technic collection, and ended up donating a PC to the classroom (where's Mindstorms for the MAC?), so it took a while to get started. Fortunately, the teacher is quite excited, as well as patient.

We are going to chronicle our teaching/learning experiences here for the benefit of others who may be trying this.

We gave our first lesson to ten students broken into two groups of five. Five of them worked with me learning about gears, while John III taught the other five to program using the Mindstorm software. After an hour, the two groups switched places. We decided that five was too many at the computer together, so from now on we will work with groups of four.

Here are MS Word files of the worksheets I prepared for those working with gears, and programming projects the kids worked on using a simple 'Bumper-Bot:

"Fun With Gears": class1.doc.
Robot Programs: class2.doc.

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