[Sebastian Goscik]’s entry in the 2017 Hackaday Prize is a line following robot. Well, not really; the end result is a line following robot, but the actual project is about a simple, cheap robot chassis to be used in schools, clubs, and other educational, STEAM education events. Along with the chassis design comes a lesson plan allowing teachers to have a head start when presenting the kit to their students.
The lesson plan is for a line-following robot, but in design is a second lesson – traffic lights which connect to a main base through a bus and work in sync. The idea of these lessons is to be fairly simple and straightforward for both the teachers and the students in order to get them more interested in STEM subjects.
What [Sebastian] noticed about other robot kits was that they were expensive or complicated or lacked tutorials. Some either came pre-assembled or took a long time to assemble. [Sebastian] simplified things – The only things required after the initial assembly of the chassis are: Zip-ties, electrical tape and a few screws. The PCB can’t be disassembled, but the assembled PCB can be reused.
The hardware [Sebastian] came up with consists of some 3mm material that can be laser cut (acrylic or wood) and a sensor board that has 5 IR LEDs and corresponding IR sensors. The chassis can be put together using nothing more than a Phillips screwdriver, and the sensor PCBs are well documented so that soldering them is as easy as possible. An Arduino is used as the brains of the unit.
[Sebastian] has come up with a great project and the idea of a platform like this with a couple of lesson plans included is a great one. He’s released the hardware under an Open Hardware license as well so others can share and add-on. Of course, there are other line following robots, like this miniature one created with analog circuitry, and there are other open source robots for teaching, like this one. But [Sebastian]’s focus on the lesson plans is a really unique way of approaching the problem – one that will hopefully be very successful.
So, to go along with this, let me introduce,
Beginning Educators Robotic Training A.K.A. B.E.R.T
I remember years ago, like 1980’s or so there was a programing language, Logo and commonly called Turtle graphics. It could be run on screen or there was an actual motor based “Turtle” that would roll around on a big sheet of paper drawing your program. I wanted but never bought it back then.
The “turtlegraphics” I am familiar with was a JAVA.jar to learn JAVA programming. You moved your “turtle” using commands like left, move, pen up… and it drew your result in a command window.
I made a lot of programs using turtlegraphics, but a few years later (because of changes to the turtlegraphics program) none of them worked.
http://users.dickinson.edu/~braught/courses/cs132s03/code/Turtle.INT.src.html
Though I am familiar with the LOGO turtle graphics, my nephew used it in Kindergarten in the ’80’s.
Ever hear of BOE bot? I thought it was a well documented educational kit.
Can anyone help me out here, the BOM only has UK parts distibuter!
basic stamp? ffffffffffffff. (thats a fart sound).
Wow.
Really nice article keep the great work on.!
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