Middle school students who regularly attended Friday afternoon robotics work sessions in the art room during the 2022-23 school year were invited to test and help de-bug a new robotics project that Mr. Bell plans use with middle school Art Tech Classes. The work sessions were 90 minutes each during 5 days in July.
Students studied code segment examples from a document created for this assignment. Each student designed a sequence of movements for his robot and wrote the appropriate segments with Spike 3 software on a Chromebook. Students used protractors and rulers to calculate the degrees headings, turning angles, and driving distances which they applied to their programming code. While all students had the same goal, they found various ways to achieve it.
The challenge was to: (1) drive from a base and shoot a ping-pong ball into a large hole in a board, (2) pull the box into which the ball falls back to base, and (3) remove an object sitting on the end of the wooden peninsula and carry it back to base.
Students used identical Spike Prime robot driving bases with catapults, which members of the group helped build during the recent school year for use in Art Tech classes. As a construction component of the project, participants built detachable arms for bringing the objects back to base. Holes near the rear of the robots allow for quick attachment and removal of attachments with “drop-in pins”. When this assignment is used with whole classes, each group of 3 or 4 students will be able to store their attachments between classes. Additional challenges can be added easily to this project if groups within a class finish the early.
Mr. and Mrs. Pandya and Saint Peter alumna Jasmine Pandya assisted Mr. Bell during the summer robotics service sessions.