Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Go, Gadget, Go! Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms
In the mid-20th century, people thought of robots as futuristic tools. But in the 21st century, robots are not a figment of our imaginations, but are a part of our reality. Robots even perform tasks that humans can't do. In this...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Accelerometer: Centripetal Acceleration
Students work as physicists to understand centripetal acceleration concepts. They also learn about a good robot design and the accelerometer sensor. They also learn about the relationship between centripetal acceleration and centripetal...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: About Accuracy and Approximation
Students learn about the concepts of accuracy and approximation as they pertain to robotics, gain insight into experimental accuracy, and learn how and when to estimate values that they measure. Students also explore sources of error...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Gears: Determining Angular Velocity
Students work as engineers and learn to conduct controlled experiments by changing one experimental variable at a time to study its effect on the experiment outcome. Specifically, they conduct experiments to determine the angular...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Arctic Animal Robot
Students create four-legged walking robots and measure how far they travel across different types of surfaces. They design and create "shoes" to add to the robots' feet and observe the effect of their modifications on the net distance...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Test a Beam
Students measure different types of small-sized beams and calculate their respective moments of inertia. They compare their calculations to how much the beams bend when loads are placed on them, gaining insight into the ideal geometry...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Biomimicry: Echolocation in Robotics
Students use ultrasonic sensors and LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots to emulate how bats use echolocation to detect obstacles. They measure the robot's reaction times as it senses objects at two distances and with different sensor threshold...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Boom Construction
Student teams design their own booms (bridges) and engage in a friendly competition with other teams to test their designs. Each team strives to design a boom that is light, can hold a certain amount of weight, and is affordable to...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Car With a Lot of Potential
Working in teams, students perform quantitative observational experiments on the motion of LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotic vehicles powered by the stored potential energy of rubber bands. Students understand that through the manipulation of...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Determining Concentration
Students quantify the percent of light reflected from solutions containing varying concentrations of red dye using LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT bricks and light sensors. They begin by analyzing a set of standard solutions with known...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Decimals, Fractions & Percentages
Students learn about and practice converting between fractions, decimals and percentages. Using a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot and a touch sensor, each group inputs a fraction of its choosing. Team members convert this same fraction into a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Deformation: Nanocomposite Compression
Students learn about nanocomposites, compression and strain as they design and program robots that compress materials. Student groups conduct experiments to determine how many LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT motor rotations it takes to compress soft...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Rotary Encoders & Human Computer Interaction
Students learn about rotary encoders and discover how they operate through hands-on experimentation. Rotary encoders are applied in tools to determine angle measurements and for translations of angular motion. One common rotary encoder...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: All Fat Is Not Created Equally!
Students learn that fats found in the foods we eat are not all the same; they discover that physical properties of materials are related to their chemical structures. Provided with several samples of commonly used fats with different...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Fibonacci Sequence & Robots
Using the LEGO NXT robotics kit, students construct and program robots to illustrate and explore the Fibonacci sequence. Within teams, students are assigned roles: group leader, chassis builder, arm builder, chief programmer, and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Friction Force
Students use LEGO MINDSTORMS robotics to help conceptualize and understand the force of friction. Specifically, they observe how different surfaces in contact result in different frictional forces. A LEGO robot is constructed to pull a...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Wide World of Gears
In an interactive and game-like manner, students learn about the mechanical advantage that is offered by gears. By virtue of the activity's mechatronics presentation, students learn to study a mechanical system as a dynamic system under...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Get in Gear
Students discover how gears work and how they can be used to adjust a vehicle's power. Specifically, they learn how to build the transmission part of a vehicle by designing gear trains with different gear ratios.
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: A Lego Introduction to Graphing
Students use a LEGO ball shooter to demonstrate and analyze the motion of a projectile through use of a line graph. This activity involves using a method of data organization and trend observation with respect to dynamic experimentation...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Haptics: Touch Command
Students experience haptic (the sense of touch) feedback by using LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots and touch sensors to emulate touch feedback recognition. With four touch sensors connected to LEGO NXTs, they design sensor attachments that...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How to Pull Something Heavy
Students measure and analyze forces that act on vehicles pulling heavy objects while moving at a constant speed on a frictional surface. They study how the cars interact with their environments through forces, and discover which...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Measuring Light Pollution
Students are introduced to the concept of light pollution by investigating the nature, sources and levels of light in their classroom environment. They learn about the adverse effects of artificial light and the resulting consequences on...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Balancing Act
Students are given the opportunity to visualize and interact with concepts they have already learned, specifically algebraic equations and solving for unknown variables. Students construct a balancing seesaw system (LEGO Balance Scale)...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Materials Properties Make a Difference
Students investigate the materials properties-such as acoustical absorptivity, light reflectivity, thermal conductivity, hardness, and water resistancea-of various materials. They use sound, light and temperature sensors to collect data...