Seeking Collective wisdom

#1

Hello from Australia

We are a small public Library in Ayr North Queensland and have a innovation space that houses 3D Printers, 3D Scanner, Coding and Robotics gear including 10 Bluetooth mBot robots and the Ultimate 2.0 Robot Kit.

We will be running classes for our community to introduce them to mBots and more and eventually they will be borrowable just like you borrow books from a library.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to introduce the mBots. What I am seeing is the documentation online is in need of some work and i am interested in peoples thoughts on what not to do when introducing people to this really interesting gear.

Regards

John

#2

I’ve taught classes with the WiFi version of the mBots over the last year. My findings are:

  1. Make sure they do some Scratch programming first so they are familiar with the mBlock (Scratch) environment.
  2. Make sure they understand the need to design first. It saves a lot of pain later.
  3. Print out the programs in color that you want to have the students implement.
  4. Start with simple programs and build more complex ones in iterations.

I wrote a short eBook that encompasses the materials I teach from (link) that you may or may not find useful. Overall the kids I was teaching (11-15 year olds) were able to design and implement all of the programs in the book. The only holdup from the first time that I taught the course was that I needed six days to teach, not five. The maze solver at the end of the book took a little more time than anticipated, so the next course I taught factored that into the timeline.

Best regards,

Chuck

#3

Hi Chuck

Many thanks for your suggestions its greatly appreciated

kind regards

John

#4

Chuck
I will buy your ebook.
Hope you continue to generate this stuff.
I think Makeblock and mBot is great , but we need training materials.
I work as a volunteer at the library and elementary school.
Be happy to help

#5

Thanks for buying the book. The proceeds go to help kids get tools, kits, and training that they might otherwise not have access to. :slight_smile:

I agree that access to training materials makes all the difference in helping kids get up to speed. I’ll be starting on volume 2 of the series in a couple of weeks (after school starts back up), focusing on the Arduino IDE and the mBot. My goal is to try to strike a balance between fun projects and teaching the underlying fundamentals (math, etc.) although I tend to aim at a middle school audience and up. However, younger kids should still enjoy the projects in the Scratch volume (volume 1).

#6

Hi to the Ayr librarians from Melbourne. What a wonderful initiative. My suggestions having played with the starter robot are:

  • getting the software from MakeBlock can be confusing, as there is alot of content online and instructions are not always clear. So provide your own online resources for borrowers to download the materials and your own initial instructions. It is probably not necessary that they always be the latest materials, but try to keep them up to date.

  • initilise the makebock board each time it is returned with a starter program so the user is up and running immediately. This will show the user its working at the outset. Provide a copy of that starter program in your materials so the user can mentally “reverse engineer” it.

  • The iOS or Android app can be a little unreliable, as the connection over bluetooth drops out occasianally. Warn the users of this. If you are using the IR version then I dont know how reliable the controller is.

#7

Hi to Ayr librarians,
I teach grade 3 to 6 children STEM using mBot + 2.4G and mBlock and have found from experience:

  1. mBot needs good fully charged or fresh batteries because nearly flat batteries cause the robot to do strange random things, this can be most upsetting for the kids as it can lead them to think that their code has a bug when its just a flat battery.
  2. Make sure everyone understands the difference between Scratch mode and Arduino (stand alone) mode, because running some programs in Scratch mode can appear to be faulty when the real problem is the time delays introduced by the communications between the mBot and the PC. (These communication time delays are not a bug, just a fact of life) Using Arduino or stand alone mode usually fixes this.
  3. Chuck’s book is very good! :slight_smile: I use it for the older kids.

Hope this helps
Phil

#8