Junkbots

An undergraduate dissertation student is looking for help. James is a computing student looking at robot designs for primary education towards his dissertation and as part of the wider  Junkbots project , and the working going on in both the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, and School of Education on Physical Computing at the University of Northampton. The short questionnaire can be found at  http://t.co/zdomXnW2Qe  and is aimed at gathering  a variety of responses from both current Teachers, Students of Education and from anyone with knowledge of programming teaching methods in both Key Stage 1 and 2. He is planning to create a product which aims to teach programming methods and practices based on the current and new national curriculum. If you would like to know more about the Junkbots project contact scott.turner@northampton.ac.uk

Junkbots - Nuffield Bursary Placement: Day 6 - The Worksheets Begin! : "Heya Today I began by doing a rough design for my trike. After some thought I realized that skis may be better than wheels, because it was..."

The junkbots project has now being running for 18 months in Northamptonshire, UK. But how have the junkbots being built? A video produced by one of the particpants can be found here , showing some of the examples. Several ways have been investigated by the participants in the next few blogs some of these will be talked about. Let's start with the main approach, simplest way and probably the quickest:- A drink can and an unbalanced motor - shaking its way around. Take a 330ml drinks can and put it on its side. Fix an electric motor over one end of the can, packing tape is good for this (but not very environmentally friendly). Attach something to the motor's spindle that unbalances the motor, the goal is to get it vibrating. Broken propellers, cogs with Blu-tak, cogs with modelling clay have all being tried. The problem with this, is turn the motor on and the junkbots rolls over onto it side and goes around in circles. A couple of fixes students have tried, adding outrigg...

Students at Brooke Weston School, Corby have been working with the University of Northampton's School of Science and Technology on the junkbots project. Scott Turner and Terry Tudor on the 16th and 17th February 2010 went to the school to run the sessions. Starting with a talk and activities on waste management, including how much waste the UK produced, and in terms of numbers of slices of toast what is the cost of energy of leaving a monitor on overnight.   The task was to produce robots out of rubbish that could carry other rubbish into a containment area. The change made to the sessions was that students brought there own 'junk' to the sessions. S ome innovative and creative designs were produced involving 'legs', wheels (including turning cans into wheels and wheels from old toys).    Some of the designs pushed rubbish into the area, but one of the designs carried the rubbish into the area and some designs used magnets to pick up small steel parts (nuts a...