This week, Becky Hack and I have been working with 20 elementary and middle school kids in a robotics strand to the University of La Crosse Young Scholars program.  The students built and programmed LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots to solve a variety of challenges that were presented to them.  Students were provided with introductory tutorials and “troubleshooting” from us, but the designs and programming were there own inventions. Here are a few examples.

Three girls took on the challenge of making a dancing robot.

Three boys built and programmed a robot to climb steps.  It IS NOT as easy as they make it look!

Four boys completed the “handshake” challenge.  In industry, robots often work in concert to complete a taks.  In this case, they built and programmed two robots to play basketball.

(They did score 3 times in a row…then the camera came on!)