Perhaps the coolest thing your kid will do this Winter is to make a robot rover track along a line. The rovers do this using a light sensor that can tell the difference between the black line and the white mat. With some simple programming, the rover “knows” to follow the line.
Maybe the coolest thing will be learning to use the touch sensors. These little gadgets can be programmed to cause an action either by being pushed in (think running into a wall) or by being released (think firing a ping pong ball). They can be used to launch the catapult or simply start and stop the car.
What will your kids think is the coolest? Will it be the walking robots, the scampering bugs, the scooper or ping pong ball launcher? The fastest rover or the drill car? Robot wars will come in near the top for many of the kids. For others it will be the first time they get the light to turn on as their house senses the rover bot approaching.
What’s cool for the parents? Perhaps it’s knowing you are giving your kids a chance to build complicated machines, learn some basic programming, or spend their afternoons experiencing gear friction, motors, and light sensor technology hands on. Perhaps it is just the hope that problem solving skills they learn will be used in all their non-lego robotics challenges, or that may spark their interest in engineering and design careers.
That’s the coolest part for me.