Chris Betcher

As much as I would have loved to have been in Melbourne all week for ACEC 2010 , it just wasn't on the cards for me. A pity, because it sounded like there was a lot of really interesting sessions to attend, and one that particularly caught my eye was the Lego Robotics one with Chris Rogers , a professor of engineering from the Centre for Engineering, Education and Outreach at Tufts University in Boston.  I've been a Lego fanboy for a long time, and have worked with kids to do some pretty awesome stuff with it over the years, but unfortunately my current school doesn't really do very much with Lego. (In fact, computer programming in general gets a pretty rough deal at PLC, something that I'd really like to see change) However, we do run a Computer Club every week in our junior school and we've decided that we will introduce programming to these kids to start with.  We've begun by getting them going with Scratch , with a plan to get some Lego Robotics gear and ma...

While trolling through some old files today I happened upon this video of some Lego robotics projects done by my Year 10 students about five years ago. I recall that their task was to build a sort of merry-go-round device that conformed to a few specific requirements. From memory it had to have provision for two "seats", and when a start button was pressed it had to rotate around align the first of these seats with a loading platform, pause, and then rotate to align the second seat. Once both seats were "loaded", it had to pause, then start rotating slowly, then get faster, until it reached top speed and did a specified number of rotations. Once these were complete if had to slow down again to a stop, aligning the first seat, then pausing again and finally aligning the second seat. Here's the video...[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/eYUOfaFEJF8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] It was an ...