Lego Mindstorms
Lego Mindstorms is a line of programmable robots made by Lego.They are often sold and used as educational tools. I am encouraging my own sons to explore these kits and learn from them. You can build and program robots to do what you want. Sounds fun to me! The robots have the ability to react to light, sound and touch. Wow!
Visit the official Lego site.
A Little History for You Originally, these kits contained two motors and two touch sensorsand one light sensor. However the NXT version is different. It has: three servomotos, and one sensor for light, sound, touch, and for determiningdistance. It almost sounds human doesn`t it. This aspect of Lego can really help to prepare our children for the future. Not totally of course, but it can be one of the tools we employ to educate them, plus the side benefit is theytend to enjoy it! NXT 2.0 Contains 2 touch sensors. It can have as many as four though.
Lego NXT: Robotics for the young to Old Lego has always been known as the “Toys for the Kids”. Their designs, colors and toy ranges are extremely versatile and eye-catching. However, Lego tends not to stay only as a brand for children; it targets the adults and the teens as well. NXT is another great toy for the teens and the adults by Lego Gods. Other Benefits of these Projects? They can be used to model an embedded system with electro-mechanical parts.1 (Wikipedia.org) MIT and Lego originally partnered to make this educational tool!Need I say more? The version for schools called, "Lego Mindstorms for Schools includes Robolab GUI based programming software which was developed at Tufts University.2 (Wikipedia.org)
All On Robots For other ways to build a robot visit All On Robots, your one stop place to find everything (literally)
about robots.
Seymour PapertIs famous in educational circles for his Piaget based educational theories and his book, "Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas," published by Basic Books. He argues for a computer based learning method called Microworld. Microworld complements a child`s innate learning style he postulizes, and a constructivist approach to learning will more uniquely match the way children naturally learn. Lego Mindstorms is named after this book, and of course is very much a constructivist approach to learning. Children learn by doing, by constructing, and of course from seeing the results of this process. "The hardware and software roots of the Mindstorms Robotics Invention System kit go back to the programmable brick created at the MIT Media Lab. This brick was programmed in Brick Logo. The first visual programming environment, called LEGOsheets,[1] for this brick was created by the University of Colorado in 1994 and was based on Agent Sheets." --Wikipedia.org
|
