My robotics classes are winding down, but i thought i'd share an experience
For my BYOB (Bring your own bot) Advanced Robotics class, I decided to use Daniele Benedettelli's 'Creating Cool Mindstorms NXT Robots for the second half of the class. For the first half i wanted to touch on structural building and touch on making state machines using NXT-G. The kids came up with some great robots and i really wish i took some photos before those robots got taken apart (save for one that was built using my parts). And despite some technical issues with Version 1.0 of NXT-G, we were able to get some basic SUMO programs using a finite state machine.
So on to the second half, I really wanted to keep the theme of getting a strong structure and have them program using state machines and such. We built the ATST out of the book and it took about 1 and 3/4 classes to build verbally. While very difficult, this can be quite rewarding. Since my kids were at a level where they all understood the parts, speaking in LEGO was really easy and i didnt have to backtrack to explain parts. But man, what a great feeling to have 7 NXT at st's walking around at the end of the class. The kids had promised to take their creations home and seriously modify them. I cant wait to get some shots of possibly modified Atsts.
The challenge now is to convert Danielle's NXC program to an NXT g Program. There's already a nice 'servomotor automagic built-in limit switch' already made by LEGO in their Education NXT (software) set. And i think i can manage some of the walking machines, but since there's no real support for array's, a lot of the number plugging will be manual. I'll see about posting when i get that ready (preferably before class next Tuesday).
So next week..watch out endor..atsts are coming
