Junkbots

The junkbots project was carried as one of the activities at the celebration of two years of Lab_13 at Irchester Community Primary School . Three groups spent around an hour developing the drawing junkbots (an example of what one is can be found in these image). The session basic revolves around two main activities: - Showing that a motor can be made to vibrate and can they think of a way to use this and other materials around them (make sure there are pens/pencils around) to make a drinks can move. - Next stage is can they modify their robot to make it draw. Details and session plans can be found at:  http://junkbots.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/junkbot-project-case-study-and-session.html   If you would like to know more about the Junkbots project contact scott.turner@northampton.ac.uk

Related to the junkbots project. Taken directly from  http://lab13network.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/rubbish-reduce-reuse-recycle-into-toys/    Rubbish – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle into toys!    Lab13 at Irchester (@Lab_13Irchester) by   lab13network Waleed and Jacob searching for goodies! Year 5 students at Irchester have been working on a very exciting project with the Dept. of Waste Management, University of Northampton. Dr. Waleed Montasser and Louise Maxwell, and Bianca, Evie and Livia (Brazilian visiting students) work alongside our Year 5s to design, plan, resource and make different Science Takeaways all using reusable and recycled materials. Science Takeaways will be a set of four science kits with different experiments for children to borrow for the weekend and try at home. They will collect data or test hypotheses and add to the kit if they think of some new way of using it. However, we wanted to keep these ta...

Taken from a blog written at Irchester Primary School  http://lab13network.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/dads-robot-lab/ about a robot activity. For more details about Lab_13 go to:  http://lab13network.wordpress.com/   Dad’s Robot Lab! Posted on   November 28, 2012   Hi! This is Morgan and Emily. Our Dads come to Dads Club in Lab_13. Last week, we had some visitors! They demonstrated how all of the robots worked. There were some amazing remote controlled robots and a Lego robot. The name of the person who worked with all of the extraordinary robots was Scott Turner. We were amazed by the robots. Thank you for coming.  The Lego robot could be controlled by the computer. The other robot could do handstands, roly-polys and cartwheels. Some were doing gymnastics, walking, bowing and dancing. The Lego robot just went all over the place!   Emily’s stepdad, Robin, said “ It was fantastic – I want a robot for Christmas.” ...

For the last few months at lot of the outreach work from the Junkbots project was focused on the exercises based around turning cans into drawing bots or junk clearing bots. Yesterday (21st June 2012) the robot programming side of the project was trialled with primary schools. The Northamptonshire based Nene Lakes Extended Services ran "Chemistry at Work Day" event hosted by Scott Bader, Wollaston  and the robot programming was also included as well. The programming idea, an off-shoot of the junkbots project, was for the students to programming an NXT Lego robot to dance using only four commands that allowed the robot to: go forward for so many centimetres go back for so many centimetres go turn right for so many degrees go turn left for so many degrees The structure of the activity was up to 5 minutes introduction to the activity up to 10 minutes as a group of usually up seven; design a dance routine of no more than four moves up to 10 minutes putting the ro...

The lego robots used in the Junkbots work were recently taken to Irchester Community Primary School as part of their Jobs in Science Week. The students programmed the robots (using a real programming language Java) using a choice of four commands to make the robots do a dance of their own design. From more details about the Lab_13 activities:  http://www.irchester.northants.sch.uk/downloads/newsletters/Lab13/LAB%2013%20-%20Issue%201%20Newsletter.pdf