Welcome to Adventures in Robotics! AiR is a 5 week summer school class I am teaching at Woodland Middle School in Gurnee, Illinois.  In AiR, the students work with Lego Mindstorms NXT kits and WowWee’s RS Media robot. Each group consists of 3 or 4 students. The groups get 3 weeks to work with the NXT kits and 1 week to customize a personality for the RS Media.

This is my first year teaching AiR.  I hope to make it an after school club that can meet year-round to explore the exciting world of robotics! Check back every week for updates on student projects including pictures and video!    

In Week 1 of our 5 week class, the students learned how to use both the Lego NXT and RS Media software. They also got to see examples of different kinds of robots in action including WowWee’s Roboquad and Ugobe’s Pleo.  They learned how various sensors worked and how robots use sensors to interact with their environment in much the same was people use their senses.  The week ended with the students working in 3 groups (Group 4 was assimilated into Groups 1-3) to build the Lego NXT Demo robot and even created some customized programs for it.  The Demo robots are pictured above.

Check out each group’s work on the group’s page. I will try to update the pages daily with pictures and video.