TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Understanding Movement in Humans and Robots
This activity helps students understand how a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot moves using motors and wheels. Then students relate the concepts of decision-making actuation and motion in humans to their parallels in mechanized robots, and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Understanding Communication With a Robot
Student pairs first act out the instructions a robot is given with one person providing instructions and the other person following the instructions. This activity helps students understand how a robot is programmed and with what type of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Nxt Ball Shooter
This activity helps students understand how a motor in a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot uses electricity produced by the battery to move a robot to do useful work in the form of throwing a ball. Students relate the concepts of electricity and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Movement Task Using Sensors Humans and Robots
This activity helps students understand the significance of programming and also how the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot's sensors assist its movement and make programming easier. Students compare human senses to robot sensors, describing...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Robot Sensors and Sound
Using microphones connected to computers running Audacity software, student teams experiment with machine-generated sounds and their own voices and observe the resulting sound waves on the screen, helping them to understand that sounds...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Master Driver
Students learn how rotational sensors measure distance, how mathematics can be used for real-world purposes, and about potential sources of error due to gearing when using rotation sensor readings for distance calculations.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Music by Touch
Through a hands-on design challenge involving LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots, students learn programming skills and logic design as they program robot computers to play sounds and rotate a wheel when a touch sensor is pressed, and then...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Control Using Sound
Students gain a deeper understanding of how sound sensors work through a hands-on design challenge involving LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT taskbots and sound sensors.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Follow the Light
A lesson involving LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots and light sensors, student pairs program the robots to follow a flashlight as its light beam moves around.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Don't Bump Into Me!
Students' understanding of how robotic ultrasonic sensors work is reinforced in a design challenge involving LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots and ultrasonic sensors.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Android App Development
Students develop an app for an Android device that utilizes its built-in internal sensors, specifically the accelerometer. The goal of this activity is to teach programming design and skills using MIT's App Inventor software (free to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Exploring Acceleration With an Android
Students conduct an experiment to study the acceleration of a mobile Android device. During the experiment, they run an application created with MIT's App Inventor that monitors linear acceleration in one-dimension. Students use an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Flow Charting App Inventor Tutorials
Students design and create flow charts for the MIT App Inventor tutorials in this computer science activity about program analysis. In program analysis, which is based on determining the behavior of computer programs, flow charts are an...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graphing the Spread of Disease
Students simulate disease transmission by collecting data based on their proximity to other students. One option for measuring proximity is by having Bluetooth devices "discover" each other. After data is collected, students apply graph...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Mars Rover App Creation
Based on their experience exploring the Mars rover Curiosity and learning about what engineers must go through to develop a vehicle like Curiosity, students create Android apps that can control LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots, simulating the...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Java Programming of Ocr
Student groups use the Java programming language to implement the algorithms for optical character recognition (OCR) that they developed in the associated lesson. The ultimate goal is to produce computer code that recognizes a digit on a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Graphing Your Social Network
Students analyze their social networks using graph theory. They gather data on their own social relationships, either from Facebook interactions or the interactions they have throughout the course of a day, recording it in Microsoft...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trigonometry via Mobile Device
Students investigate the relationships between angles and side lengths in right triangles with the help of materials found in the classroom and a mobile device.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Testing With J Unit
JUnit is a testing method that is included with NetBeans (Java) installs or can be downloaded from the web and included in the Java build. In this activity, students design tests for a provided Java class before the class methods are...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: An Implementation of Steganography
Students apply the design process to the problem of hiding a message in a digital image using steganographic methods, a PictureEdit Java class, and API (provided as an attachment). They identify the problems and limitations associated...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Python Script Analysis
Working in small groups, students complete and run functioning Python codes.This requires students to understand the logic employed, and then they must make modifications to the code in order to find the slopes of tangents to a variety...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Estimating the Storage Capacity of a Cd/dvd
Students estimate the storage capacity of CDs and DVDs by assessing diffraction patterns of green and red laser beams.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Who Can Make the Best Coordinate System?
Students learn about coordinate systems in general by considering questions concerning what it is that the systems are expected do, and who decided how they look. They attempt to make their own coordinate systems using a common area...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: What's Wrong With the Coordinates at the North Pole?
Students complete a self-guided exercise in worksheet format combined with Google Earth that helps them explore practical and observable differences between different projection and coordinate systems. The activity improves their skills...