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: Tug of War Battle Bots
Students are introduced to the concepts of torque, power, friction and gear ratios. Teams modify two robotic LEGO vehicles by changing their gear ratios, wheel sizes, weight and engine power, while staying within a limit of points to...
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: Robo Clock
Students learn various topics associated with the circle through studying a clock. Topics include reading analog time, understanding the concept of rotation (clockwise vs. counter-clockwise), and identifying right angles and straight...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Trebuchet Launch
Students work as engineers to design and test trebuchets (in this case LEGO MINDSTORMS robots) that can launch objects. During the testing stage, they change one variable at a time to study its effect on the outcome of their designs....
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Teach Engineering: Save the Stuffed Animal! Push & Pull
Students develop an understanding of the concepts of "push" and "pull" as they "save" stuffed animals from danger using LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots. After learning more about the concepts through a robot demonstration, students explore...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: The Power of Mechanical Advantage
Students learn about the mechanical advantage offered by pulleys in an interactive and game-like manner. By virtue of the activity's mechatronic presentation, they learn to study a mechanical system not as a static image, but rather as a...
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: How Do You Make a Program Wait?
Building on the programming basics learned so far in a corresponding Robotics unit, students learn how to program using sensors rather than by specifying exact durations. Working with the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots and software, they...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: How Does a Touch Sensor Work?
Students look at human senses and their electronic imitators, with special focus on the skin and touch sensors. They have a chance to handle and get familiar with the LEGO touch sensor, including programming LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots to...
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...
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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: 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: Molecules: The Movement of Atoms
Students work as engineers to learn about the properties of molecules and how they move in 3D space through the use of LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotics. They design and build molecular models and use different robotic sensors to control the...
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Teach Engineering: Measuring Noise Pollution
Through investigating the nature, sources and level of noise produced in their environment, students are introduced to the concept of noise pollution. They learn about the undesirable and disturbing effects of noise and the resulting...
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Teach Engineering: States of Matter
Students act as chemical engineers and use LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robotics to record temperatures and learn about the three states of matter. Properties of matter can be measured in various ways, including volume, mass, density and...
TeachEngineering
Teach Engineering: Using Waits, Loops and Switches
Students incorporate their knowledge of wait blocks, loops, and switches into their programming of the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robots to perform different tasks depending on input from a sound sensor and two touch sensors. This activity...
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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...
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Teach Engineering: Means, Modes, and Medians
Students experience data collection, analysis and inquiry in this LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT -based activity. They measure the position of an oscillating platform using a ultrasonic sensor and perform statistical analysis to determine the mean,...
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Teach Engineering: A Chance at Monte Carlo
At its core, the LEGO MINDSTORMS product provides a programmable microprocessor. Students use the EV3 processor to simulate an experiment involving thousands of uniformly random points placed within a unit square. Using the underlying...
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.
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Teach Engineering: Our Bodies Have Computers and Sensors
Students learn about the human body's system components, specifically its sensory systems, nervous system and brain, while comparing them to robot system components, such as sensors and computers. The unit's life sciences-to-engineering...
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Teach Engineering: Let's Take a Slice of Pi
Working as a team, students discover that the value of pi (3.1415926) is a constant and applies to all different sized circles. The team builds a basic robot and programs it to travel in a circular motion. A marker attached to the robot...
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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...