CODING AND ROBOTS

       Many students find robots very interesting.  And if the robots can be used in the classroom, integrating programming and content, that's even better.  It's important to note that for this page I'll be talking about programmable robots - robots that can be programmed to execute certain tasks.  You might think that such robots would be mostly concerned with some task related to science or mathematics, but actually some of the most interesting tasks can come from the areas of art, music, dance, or theatre.
     A good example might be the Artie 3000 robot.  It's available on Amazon for about $50.00 and you can find it at Walmart or Target, but it's a bit more expensive.  It's pretty easy to code - here's a simple demonstration on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FyS_4ZTyK4  The coding environment looks like this:

     You can see that the commands are pretty simple: pen up, pen down, and then turns and moves where you can set the values.  Geometric figures are easy to figure out but you can also draw circles, ovals, letters, and other interesting shapes.


     You can use it for drawing, illustrating stories, and for geometry.
     While the Artie 3000 is described as a programmable drawing robot, it's pretty easy to see that it's a programmable robot with a pen attached.  Thinking of programmable art robots that way means that you can also, with a minor adaptation, turn popular robots like Dash, Makeblock, or the ReCon 6.0 Programmable Rover, into drawing bots.  Links for those bots:
     These robots can all be programmed using a block-based language like Scratch and will work with tablets, phones, and computers.

The Hummingbird Board.
      "The Hummingbird Robotics Kit is comprised of lights, sensors, and motors, which allow students to build a robot out of any materials, with any device, in multiple programming languages."  From the Hummingbird Board website: https://www.birdbraintechnologies.com/hummingbirdbit/  
     The Hummingbird Board is a USB plug-in board that lets you connect a variety of sensors (light, motion, temperature) to a variety of output devices (leds, motors) and create a program to mediate that interaction.  It's particularly good for building interactive machines and robots.  It can be programmed in a variety of languages and for a number of platforms (PC, Mac, Chromebook, Unix.)  Take a look at this site to see some of the creative uses (across the curriculum) that educators have developed for their classrooms:  https://www.birdbraintechnologies.com/hummingbirdbit/teach/  You can see one great example, Moving Masterpieces: Recreate a painting as a three-dimensional art form, here: https://www.birdbraintechnologies.com/hummingbirdbit/teach/project/moving-masterpieces/
     Learning how to build with the Hummingbird is pretty easy - the website has lots of great tutorials and other resources (including downloadable comic book versions of guides.)  As a bonus, the Hummingbird Duo board has an Arduino board on the back, so you're really getting two programmable boards.  The kits - there are several, from basic to premium - are very nice and come with lots of accessories (sensors, leds, motors).  


     We used these boards as part of a recent grant project (STEMLabs) and educators saw them as being very useful.  I've copied some links from that grant's website below:

An introduction to the Hummingbird Board  
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-MBI6SrOlLIbk5zNHpwNnZRWGc/view

Hummingbird Boards and Scratch
http://stemlabsnn.blogspot.com/2017/09/hummingbird-boards-and-scratch.html

Programming the Hummingbird
http://stemlabsnn.blogspot.com/p/design.html



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