My challenge this time around was how to keep the students excited while requiring them to learn some more sophisticated programming or building techniques. While I could include limiting conditions like you must use a certain sensor to detect your opponent or you must program evasive behavior, I have found that the students soon get tired of these additional limitations and I soon defeat the whole purpose of the endeavor this way. More often than not ( watch the entire playlist if you like) robots would smash into each other and then push forever, like this: Most of the time I would get two robots that drive into each other like this: While sometimes I get a cool result like this one where the students employed technique and strategy: Lacking in sophistication, difficulty, solid building principles, etc. Yet as I continually orchestrated this final unit, I found it was lacking. With almost universal buy-in, they gleefully build and program robots to battle each other and knock their opponent out of the ring and into oblivion. One of the highlights of my class – as far as my students are concerned – has always been the Sumobot competition. I’ve been teaching this class in its current form for two years, though I’ve been teaching Robotics for eight all together. I have thirty-four computers in my classroom and one EV3 kit for every two students. I meet each class for one 50-minute period each day, five days a week. For this particular trimester I have one class of thirty-two students and one class of thirty-four students. My school is on a trimester schedule so the course runs for thirteen weeks at a time. My students are 7th graders who are required to take the course and may not necessarily have any background in programming/building. I teach an introductory course using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set.

Battlebit controls