In coding class today, the kids continued to build the massive Spinner Factory robot. But today I introduced them to a simple Kanban board to keep track of what was built. The instructions include 465 steps.
Over the weekend Mr. John saw a video from a young woman who studies robotics. Her advice on how to learn robotics was to tear things apart and then put them back together.
In coding class we finished the code for the ellaphants we built. The kids made a program that would use the robot keypad buttons to control what it did. Up button to make the elephant walk forward. Down button for backward. Left button for head tilt and trunk trumpeting. And right button for picking up an object.
In today's coding class we started on a motorcycle robot. It will use the gyroscopic sensor to keep itself balanced on 2 wheels. All they had for instructions was a video showing a working Lego motorcycle. No build instructions and no programming instructions.
The coding class finished programming their recent robot. They learned how to have multiple threads of program execution and how to interrupt one thread from another and how to use global variables as flags to send quick messages across threads.
In this week's coding class we discussed program threads and how Lego Mindstorms software allows kids to create multi-threaded programming. The kids finished building the Znap robot from instructions and then started programming it with only the rough outline that was written on the board as a guide. They need to use multiple loops, variables, and a new loop interrupt instruction.
