More than 75 third- through fifth-grade students in a Texas district recently competed in a robotics mini-challenge, designing, building, and programming their devices to navigate a maze, locate Pac Man, and eventually drive Pac Man out of the maze, the Killeen Daily Herald reports.
Part of the challenge is to determine how many rotations the wheels on their robots need to make in order to navigate the maze. If the number students program initially doesn’t work, they make an adjustment and try again.
“They get to do it in a more trouble-shooting type of way instead of me just telling them that if they do something one way, this is what will happen,” the paper quoted Chelsie Raysor as saying. She’s a fifth-grade science teacher and robotics coach at House Creek Elementary, which hosted the mini-challenge on Feb 7. “They retain it better because they will remember that ‘when I did it that way, my robot ran into the wall and broke into pieces.’ They have some really interesting things happen and they remember what worked and what didn’t work.”
Texas is one of four states that never adopted the Common Core, but all the math involved in programming the robots fits right in with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, which are required learning for all students in the state.
To travel a distance of 3 meters, how many rotations should a robot’s wheels make if the wheels have a diameter of 18 cm? See Common Core seventh-grade math standard 7.G.B.4 for more information.