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I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take aw

by patja 9y ago

I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take away all of the remote controls and tell them they have to program it. I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated" portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall into the trap of treating it all like a remote controlled toy and never get very deep into the programming aspect.

jjjensen90 9y ago
How and where did you get this job? It sounds like my dream job
- SpeciesInvader 9y ago
  In Chicago there's a robot store always looking for teachers to help students about that age range (maybe even younger). Can't remember details, but if your city has a robotics store, chances are they can help you get into teaching.
eat_veggies 9y ago
I don't remember FLL having a teleop mode. Back when I did it, it was fully autonomous, but things may have changed since then. However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.
- greenleafjacob 9y ago
  Isn’t it FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition)? It’s kind of simplistic to say all you need is a good teleop period. In many competitions some teams that had worse teleop were picked because they could consistently score in autonomous, which is pretty good EV.
imgabe 9y ago
Having worked on some warehouse automation equipment briefly in the past, I'd say they can meet that definition. The equipment I worked on was called a tilt-tray sorter system. Packages would arrive along a conveyor belt and get put on a tray in a big train of trays (like a roller coaster for boxes). A scanner would read a bar code on the package (sense). The bar code would correspond to a particular loading bay where a truck was waiting that the package needed to be put on. (think - match code with loading bay). When the tray went around and reached the chute for that loading bay it would tilt up and slide the box down to where it could be loaded (act).
Jach 9y ago
This makes an Alexa device a robot, especially when integrated in a smart house. I don't like that. (It's an occasional source of disagreement I have with a friend.) I think in order to be a robot, it needs movement. Either it can move something that could reasonably be called "itself", or it has direct peripherals like an arm on the same "itself" that can move things around it. Thus giving an Alexa device a robot arm, or some robot wheels, and letting it move itself or manipulate things around itself, would make it a robot, even if most of the brains are in the cloud. Of course even with the requirement of mechanical motion, you could still argue a toaster is a robot. It's hard to define robot: http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult-to-define-robot/ http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult...

by patja 9y ago

jjjensen90 9y ago

How and where did you get this job? It sounds like my dream job

SpeciesInvader 9y ago
In Chicago there's a robot store always looking for teachers to help students about that age range (maybe even younger). Can't remember details, but if your city has a robotics store, chances are they can help you get into teaching.

eat_veggies 9y ago

I don't remember FLL having a teleop mode. Back when I did it, it was fully autonomous, but things may have changed since then. However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.

greenleafjacob 9y ago
Isn’t it FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition)? It’s kind of simplistic to say all you need is a good teleop period. In many competitions some teams that had worse teleop were picked because they could consistently score in autonomous, which is pretty good EV.

imgabe 9y ago

Having worked on some warehouse automation equipment briefly in the past, I'd say they can meet that definition. The equipment I worked on was called a tilt-tray sorter system. Packages would arrive along a conveyor belt and get put on a tray in a big train of trays (like a roller coaster for boxes). A scanner would read a bar code on the package (sense). The bar code would correspond to a particular loading bay where a truck was waiting that the package needed to be put on. (think - match code with loading bay). When the tray went around and reached the chute for that loading bay it would tilt up and slide the box down to where it could be loaded (act).

Jach 9y ago

This makes an Alexa device a robot, especially when integrated in a smart house. I don't like that. (It's an occasional source of disagreement I have with a friend.) I think in order to be a robot, it needs movement. Either it can move something that could reasonably be called "itself", or it has direct peripherals like an arm on the same "itself" that can move things around it. Thus giving an Alexa device a robot arm, or some robot wheels, and letting it move itself or manipulate things around itself, would make it a robot, even if most of the brains are in the cloud. Of course even with the requirement of mechanical motion, you could still argue a toaster is a robot. It's hard to define robot: http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult-to-define-robot/ http://robohub.org/robohub-roundtable-why-is-it-so-difficult...