This last Monday was spent all day working with Math teachers, showing them how to use robotics in the classroom, specifically aimed at math activities (as opposed to ‘robot’ activities).  We looked at a range of activities, but I feel the one that semed to excite them the most was a simple ‘1 action’ program.

Method:

Take your day of the month you were born, add 15 to it and multiply by 2.  This gives you your unique ‘power setting’.  This works well in a classroom as it ensure that all groups end up with different results, making it difficult for one group to steal another groups data

Program the robot to move forward for 1 second (at your unique power level) and record how far it goes

Program it to go forward for 2 seconds and record how far it travels

Continue varying the time travelled and record the distance travelled

Plot the time taken against the distance moved

We ended up with something similar to this

From this you can see that the relationship between the distance and time taken is roughly proportional.  Then with our trust helper Penelope the Polar bear, we set a distance (54cms in this case) and the teachers had to either extrapolate (look beyond their data) or interpolate (look between their data) to decide how many seconds their robot needed to go to get to Penelope but not run her over.  As each group had their own unique number, the time needed for each robot was different.

We tossed around a few concepts that this type of activity could delve into and came up with this.

Speed and velocity

Gathering data

Graphing data

Interpolation / Extrapolation

Averaging samples (ie. should take more than one reading for each time period)

Experimental error

Can you think of any more? Please let me know in the comments below.