Lego mindstorms building instructions 9797

How long were your sessions? How long did your weekly prep last? Did you take everything apart after each session?

Hi Jess, Thanks so much for letting me know you find this useful. I always brought in a working version of the robot they were supposed to build so that they could get an idea of how it should work before trying it themselves. The only other prep I did was for the lesson plans with line following or mazes was that I would lay out the lines with black electrical tape on the floor or on butcher paper just before the class.

I had 12 kids in my class working in 6 groups of 2. I found that if the group size got any bigger than 2, there was always a kid who was doing nothing. Classroom management is always a challenge! There are always a couple of kids who would rather just free build or come up with their own agenda rather than follow the lesson plan.

In the end, I just let those kids do their thing while trying to engage them as much as possible, but it was impossible to keep every single kid on task. The most enjoyable part for the kids was definitely trying to accomplish the challenges, and it allowed them to work at different speeds. I generally had to explain the concepts to them verbally, no matter how explicitly they were written down. Good luck with your class, and kudos to you for doing it.

Sorry for not responding sooner. This was really helpful, so many thanks for writing this up. My experience thus far is similar. We have 8 kids in groups of 2 which is working well. Though the written instructions are indeed not read very thoroughly by the kids, I do find that having a check sheet that laid out the steps in terms of task sharing has been helpful in keeping both kids in each team engaged.

Choose who will be the builder and who will be the designer for task 1. I appreciate the lesson plans you have posted. I have hosted after school programs and winter programs before. When I came across your lesson plans I thought I had struck gold! Thank you sharing you knowledge and effort with out Lego community! Thank you so much for letting me know! Good luck with your camp. Ive been trying to download the documents and it wont let me.

Can you send me the documents as well? I am looking to incorporate robotics in a summer camp that we are doing at my school and everything is so overwhelming. A streamlined guide would be very helpful for me to learn the capabilities of the device as well as teach it. Thanks for making them available!

I work for a public library and we are planning a Lego Mindstorms program starting in September. We have been looking at the EV3 version and I was wondering if that is similar enough to be able to use your curriculum with the newer version?

However, in the software, the programming blocks and fields for entering data into those blocks looks very different in Mindstorms and EV3, so the screenshots in the lesson write-ups would be confusing to use with the EV3 sets. Thanks so much for posting these. Good luck with it! Hi Jess, my son is starting a free robotics club in his community. Is there any chance you could share some of the documentation you created.

Jess—thanks for the suggestion of the book. He has his students watch them and then do the activities. Hi there, thank you for a great page. I have been trying to download the curriculum content but unable to. Could you pls email it to me pls? So happy I found this page!!! I am also having difficulty downloading. Could you send it to me?

I am helping to develop a before school program and this will help us get off to a great start. Which ev3 Kit did you use for these projects? Tami, did you end up making the changes to fit the EV3? We decided to start with the basic robot, then let the kids pick.

I only made it through about 3 weeks of the program so far. Oops, I just read your reply. I think I will try to convert the curriculum myself. Hope you are recovered. I would really like to take a look at it. Hi Harrison, All the downloads from my site seem to have disappeared.

I am planning a semester-long class for after Christmas and could use the inspiration! Hi Harrison, I fixed the download problem, so you can try to download the files from the article now. Thanks so much for your help. Would you be interested in being available to receive student emails or tweets…maybe even Skype into class to encourage them? Thank you for your lessons. Hi Danielle, I fixed the broken download links in the post.

Let me know if you are unable to download the files and I will e-mail them to you. Just finished prepping for the first lesson and starting tomorrow with kids. I was just wondering if there is an answer key to the challenges. Sorry, but I never did make an answer key. I always ran the experiments a few days before having the kids do them just to make everything worked out alright.

Most of the time, the kids who attempted the challenges were able to figure them out by themselves — at least with a few big hints. Good luck with your class! I have been searching the net for some type of lesson that could help me get started. I have read the comments and believe this is exactly what I am looking for however I am not able to download it.

Is it possible for you to send it to my email? Hello, Thank you so much for such a fantastic resource. I was recently approached to coach a lego league for the next school year and was looking for ways to get myself and my son introduced to mindstorms..

You truly imbibe the core values that the league makes their cornerstone by lowering the barrier to entry for new entrants like me.. Thank you so much for your kind words. Good luck with your FLL team. We had a fantastic experience with it ourselves — I coached for three years, and my son is now doing FTC first Tech Challenge at his school. Thank you for your lessons. Hi Danielle, I fixed the broken download links in the post. Let me know if you are unable to download the files and I will e-mail them to you.

Just finished prepping for the first lesson and starting tomorrow with kids. I was just wondering if there is an answer key to the challenges.

Sorry, but I never did make an answer key. I always ran the experiments a few days before having the kids do them just to make everything worked out alright.

Most of the time, the kids who attempted the challenges were able to figure them out by themselves — at least with a few big hints. Good luck with your class! I have been searching the net for some type of lesson that could help me get started. I have read the comments and believe this is exactly what I am looking for however I am not able to download it.

Is it possible for you to send it to my email? Hello, Thank you so much for such a fantastic resource. I was recently approached to coach a lego league for the next school year and was looking for ways to get myself and my son introduced to mindstorms.. You truly imbibe the core values that the league makes their cornerstone by lowering the barrier to entry for new entrants like me..

Thank you so much for your kind words. Good luck with your FLL team. We had a fantastic experience with it ourselves — I coached for three years, and my son is now doing FTC first Tech Challenge at his school. It really is a wonderful organization that deserves a lot of support. Thank you for this resource. Initially I intended to start an FLL team but i like your idea of breaking them up in groups of two; that would be far more manageable and effective.

The challenge I see are resources: Do you have a recommended source for cheap laptops that meet the system requirements to run the software. For the intro to Mindstorms class, I found that teams of two kids worked well because each could contribute.

With more than two kids to a setup, I found that one was always wandering off or getting distracted. In the competitions, we actually got more prizes for our research than we did for the robot game. The school where I ran the Mindstorms class actually had enough laptops for me to use — I was fortunate. And it was a K school which taught a robotics class using Mindstorms in the upper school. They let me use their Mindstorms sets to teach the elementary school kids.

We had about a dozen kids and 6 sets total. My only suggestion would be that desktops work quite well, too, if the school has any of those installed in some sort of lab. I wish you a lot of luck. I am planning to teach a few underprivileged kids, is there a way i could get in touch with you? So sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I put an unzipped version of the files in dropbox at https: Let me know if you have trouble accessing them there.

And good luck with your class! Thanks a million times.. I was really lost in trying to teach my kid how to use the lego mindstorm. With these lessons its going to be really easy. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge, which is still relevant and an handy resource — more than a year after your initial post.

Contrary to what people believe, the ability to troubleshoot Dell based hardware and Windows based software, does not make me a robotic expert — by any stretch of the imagination. Thank you so much. We inherited some of the older NXT kits so I want to use them in some way.

It is so kind of you to share this with others! Thank you so much for creating this curriculum. It was the first for the school as well. It has been a complete success. My administration wants to turn the class into an enrichment class and buy more kits. I loved your pictures and challenges. It allowed me to learn from my students and become a facilitator, not a lecturer. This is so great! I am hoping to teach Lego Mindstorms as an after school club soon.

I tried to download, but both said error. Could you email it to me? Thank you very much for uploading this! Such a great help!!!! I am wondering what items you used in lesson six? Hi Cynthia, I just fixed a bug in the downloads manager for this site thanks for pointing out your problem , so please try again to download the files.

Thank you so much for creating and posting this curriculum. The kids had a blast making their door alarms work. I am teaching a kids summer course with the EV3 kits. Any programming tips or things you learned using these kits would be helpful. Thanks for your NXT info as well — easy to understand! It definitely needs to be adapted to work with EV3, but the concepts still hold.

I do remember that having more than two kids sharing a robot was a recipe for goofing off, so the fewer kids per robot, the better. Some kids are just too tempted to free-build with LEGOs and it can be hard to keep them on task. It helped a little to write the milestones for each class down, and nudge them towards getting each one accomplished.

The kids learned far more by doing the building and trying to solve the challenges than by anything I actually told them directly. Good luck with your summer course — the Mindstorms are a fantastic teaching tool, and I hope you have fun with them. Thank you so much for uploading this great tuturial! You have no idea how much time this will save me! Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email. About Links Contact Search. Do you have it in pdf? Those changes should be easy enough to make. When I downloaded the plans they were encrypted.