LEGO Engineering Symposium

It has been a cool three days at Tufts University with the LEGO Engineering Symposium at the CEEO.   We saw the new edition of Lab View and Andy Bell introduced some new LEGO Green Challenge educational products.  If you are looking for an off-season FLL activity for your students, this would be great and the mat fits onto an FLL table.

Check out the Lab View Education Site.  I attended one workshop on the LabView Education Edition.  I did my first LabView programming in several years and we made a simple line NXT  Robot with line tracker and motion sensor.  The robots also had a motion sensor to simulate autonomous driving on a highway where the cars need a separation distance.  I am excited to have the BUA robotics team use LabView across our platforms.

My lab partner was Steve Hassenplug, who is an expert in building things out of LEGOS.  Thinking of the Wizard Chess from Harry Potter.  Alejandro asked me the other day about building a big chess set out of LEGOS.  This guy has actually done it, and the chess pieces are robots that actually move!       Monster Chess Site

Another workshop I attended was on creating Stop Action Animation SAM  SAM Animation Site.  I made a simple Stop Action Movie of a Skateboard.    I see SAM useful on many levels.  With the robots team we can use it to plan and explain our game strategy.  For my physics class, I could use it to create prelab explanations that demonstrate instead of explaining with words.  Students doing postlab analysis could use SAM to show what happened in the experiment.  Or animations could be created to explain what happened in the experiment.  This will really enhance the online digital Science 2.0 lab notebook.  We also took some video footage from our camera phone and imported it into SAM.   It needs to be a small clip otherwise there are too many frames.

Message of the day.   “Learn from your failures!”