Inventors club
Guidance and resources for self-directed roboticists.
Individual programs
At this level, students gets a one-on-one conversation to establish what they hope to achieve and a project is created for them.
Freeform problem solving
Students who want to consolidate their existing skills can choose to identify their own problem. One student set himself the task of loading the greatest number of balls in the shortest possible time into a container at a fixed height above the ground. His solution involved a ramp, with six motors on one side, coordinated so that their sweeping arms continually pushed balls up the ramp. Novel, and fast.
Program the RCX
A crate load of the best robot Lego ever made is available and raises some interesting possiblities, in terms of really complex robots and multi-robot cooperation. There are enough light sensors to think about the design of an insect eye
Engineering
The ancient Chinese army had a statue, mounted on a cart, that always pointed in the same direction, no matter how the cart turned. This would be a simple project using differential gears.
The robot gripper in the pictures is a complex project. It came from "The Mechanics of Machines" by W. Cleghorn. The book asks readers to use a computer program to optimise the design shown in the diagram but robotSchool made it with the parts available in Lego.
The same book has other potentially interesting projects.
Just talking
Several students who will definitely make their mark in the future have attended robotSchool to discuss their own projects. One young man had decided to carve a careeer in video games and he was helped to understand the maths shortcuts he wanted to incorporate into his image processing. Another student, who went on to win a national prize for his Arduino programming, had the physics of a breathyliser explained to him.
