Lego Stairs Climber

Date:  Sep 19, 2015

It is Saturday again.  Jay attends Robotics class every Saturday with his friend Riyandi.

This class teaches them how to use Lego Mindstorms to solve problem.

Let’s check it out how is their progress of learning robotics.

Wow!  They are treating it like their home.  Lying on the floor to program.  (no sleeping ya)

This week project is to climb the stairs.  And the stairs is these few stairs as shown below.

Sounds simple right?  

Well, this is a two weeks project.  Last week they failed.  Hahahaha  

This week, they seems to come up with a new design.

Last week, they build a robotic car that is powerful enough to climb one stairs and get stucked there.

So, teacher Enzo only flashed them with a video to prove that it can be done.  Perhaps a video of what they can do, and they have to build the robotic cars themselves without instructions.  I LIKE!

Think… Master Builder.

After they build the car, they will need to figure out how to program it.  Also modify and improve it.

See how much fun they have.  And how many times they have failed.  And they keep on learning to improve it.

Jay Jay slowly understand what is the problem he is facing.

OK.  Let’s see some actions.

This week, they added the climber wheels.  The figured that they need that climber wheels to pull the robot car up the stairs.

So, they need to figure out what to do, once they got on to one stair.

Riyandi one has a shorter climber wheels.  And why it got stuck?

So, that is the problem the kids have to fix.

 Jay’s one has a longer climber wheels but more unstable due to length. And notice that just below the EV3 module, there are two pieces of lego sticking out and that is obstructing the movement.  So, he has to redesign that so to make it smooth.

Almost there.  But keep repeating the actions as it failed to move up stairs #2.

By this time, there is only Jay Jay left in the class.  All the rest  have to go off because they have other activity.  So, Jay Jay gets all the attention from teacher Enzo.

But still he could not make it to the top stairs.  But his bot almost did it.

The reason is because the parts that holding the climber wheels are not strong enough.  So, that is why you see that it always bend a little, and that does not create the strength to pull the bot up.

So, Enzo passed him and let him go.  And he is so excited and explain to me what happen, etc etc.

The country wanted all the kids to learn programming and be a smart nation.

So, I guess Jay Jay should be fully prepare for it. 

This coming School holidays, I will teach him how to program an App.  :)