Today we used what we learned yesterday about construction and friction in our projects. Campers constructed a "driving base unit" using the LEGO NXT "intelligent brick" as the basis for the robotic vehicle. This sophisticated system emphasizes the programming aspects of robotics and offers a wide variety of engineering and modeling possibilities. The first challenge "Walk the Dog" challenged the campers to program their unit to move forward from one box into another. The challenges continued and increased in difficulty. "Walk the Dog Around the Corner" and "Walk the Dog Back Home," further enabled campers to use their programming skills to make the robotic vehicle turn right and left as well as travel in reverse. The another difficult challenge, "Walk the Dog Around the Block," challenged students to program their robots to travel around a predetermined area. The most difficult challenge was "Robot Spelling Bee" where campers used the robot to drive to specific spots containing alphabet letters to spell out words. The locations were at various angles and around corners making it a very difficult but fun activity.

To see a larger size of any photograph, just click on it. Use the Back button on your browser to return to this page. If you want to download a photograph and save it on your own computer, first click on it to get the large size. Then right click on the large size of the photograph and select Save Picture As: