Arts and Bots-Barboursville Middle School Math Class

Doug Force's, math teacher at Barboursville Middle School in Barboursville, West Virginia accepted the challenge to inject robotics into his curriculum first semester of the 2012-2013 school year. His students used everyday household items to make robots. Once their robots were created, their challenge was to find what they did that pertained to mathematics. Other questions asked were as follows :

1. How do I make something happen on my robot when I get close to it?

2. How do I make a purple strobe light?

3. How do I make something move on my robot?

4.  What is unique about my robot? 

5.  What have I learned from this experience?

Students and their parents brought their robots to teachers' Arts and Bots follow- up meeting this week on Marshall's campus to share them with pre-service and in-service teachers. 

Thanks for the support from Benedum Foudation, next semester, Doug will continue to use Arts and Bots with a new group of students and we look forward to seeing more creative robots!

Pre-Engineering At Huntington High School, WV

Students in the Pre-Engineering class at Huntington High School show off their robots.

Shark

"My shark is hooked up to a light and motion sensor. There is a fish in his mouth that has a LED light for an eye, and vibrates. It is sequenced so that if you get too close, the fish vibrates and when the lights go out his eyes light up."

Helicopter

"I am going to explain a little bit about my robot. Well first of all it is a battering ram helicopter. What it does is that if you want to take a building from the top to the bottom you use this because it comes down like a hammer. But you have to be a pretty good pilot because one mistake can cause you to crash. This shows you how crazy my imagination is. Here is a video to show you exactly what it does."

Rain

"My project is about a rainy day where there is a cloud that turns over and rains. There is a servo motor on the top loft and it has balsa wood where the rain sits on. When it turns over it rains little blue packing peanuts to the ground."

Wizard

"I was inspired to create this scene while working in the orchestra for our school's production of Beauty and the Beast. While playing the music, I realized that the main themes of the music were small and oft repeated. I wanted to incorporate this aspect into a small scene. Originally the wizard was going to tell the story, but ironically, Beauty and the Beast caused time to run short. His lines would have been things such as "Darkness fell on the forest" and "Stay away!!" and "I told you to stay away!" I am quite pleased with this project."

Car

"The robot is car like design with features that are similar to ones you would find on a car. The headlights brighten when the lights go out and the brake lights brighten when the robot stops. The robot will stop and back up when an object is placed in front of it before resuming its forward motion. The movement of the robot is powered by a motor that is attached to a sprocket that turns a chain which is connected to sprockets fixed on the robots two axles thus turning the wheels."

Dragon

"This robot is a design of a dragon. I choose this design because I figured it would be cool and not a lot of people would chose this design. It uses a motion sensor which is located on its left arm, 2 tri colored LEDs for eyes, 3 servos to move its wings and its tail. The whole body of the dragon is made out of popsicle sticks and has fake fire coming out of its mouth. The wings is a type of green frabic and it is pieced togethered with glue and tape. The robot does a lot of stuff like move its wings and tail, makes sounds, and changes it's eye color."

R2D2

"I decided to make my robot a model of R2D2. I went to my basement to salvage some trash and old junk which we no longer needed and as a result, the base of my robot is made of a flashlight and foam. The head is entirely foam, and all of the body is wrapped in super glue. I bought cardboard boxes for $0.44 each and constructed multiple legs and other useful parts. parts of its eyes are also the top of a pen cap and all of the blue shiny paper is origami paper from my drawers. All in all, it was a fun project, but there were some difficult parts which had to be overcome. One of which is putting the hummingbird inside caused wiring extremely difficult and next to impossible to see where what was going. Thats where tweezers come it! The next difficult issue, probably the hardest, was overcoming torque with R2D2's wheels. the motor does not have any sort of attachment process, so only glue could have been used. This caused the twisting to come off multiple times until I found the perfect ratio of hot glue and super glue. Finally, the last difficult issue was the fact that the arts and bots program was unable to load my MC Hammer "cant touch this" song. I had to troubleshoot it and work it through itunes instead. My original plan wanted it to pace back and forth, checking every second for an object, and when something would obstruct its view, it would dance. I instead had to put this at a predictable time since I, manually, had to click itunes. overall all, it was a fun and interesting project and I recommend it for any highschool kid."

School link: http://www.edline.net/pages/Huntington_High_School