NEAT+2dot4

An interesting question came up today. I wrote a program in NXT-G to accept values for the move block configuration in seconds, and display rotations. My purpose was to have students have two sources of data for them to work with: the rotations calculated by the robot, and the distance traveled for students to observe and measure directly.The code blocks are shown below: What I am excited about accomplishing with this program is that it will display on-screen data showing the work that the robot has just done, and while the student is recording the on-screen data about motor rotations, s/he will be right next to the tape measure showing distance traveled after each trial. I think that repeating these trials will be very helpful in developing the concepts of mean, median, and mode. My observation is that these concepts, as presented in 5th grade textbooks produce a skill that students can "do" but have much poorer results in terms of a concept that students truly understand, and can both explain and apply. The same is true, I think, with regard to rounding. The displayed results students will see show "rotations (times) 1000" with two lines of (hopefully not too cryptic) instructions: "Move dec 3 left." and "Round to 10ths." With this exercise, it will provide plenty of opportunities to explore concepts underlying facility in manipulating numbers with decimals, such as:
 * every whole number can have a decimal point to the right of the "ones place" --even if it is not shown
 * multiplication and division by powers of ten can be quickly and easily done without pencil and paper, or a calculator
 * not every digit is "significant"
 * there is a practical purpose to learning to round numbers

It was fascinating to explore the challenges posed by the NXT computer being limited to performing "integer math" by truncating (chopping off and discarding) anything to the right of the decimal point (the one that ends up being invisible). If I simply divided the number of degrees of rotation by 360, it would have simply shown me 8 rotations. By multiplying by 1000 first, it preserved more digits--out to the point at which digits start repeating-- and feels less like spoon-feeding the students. They will still have to think! I'm solidly in favor of thinking! On the other hand, I'm a big fan of shortcuts. It would drive me crazy to see a kid earnestly get out paper and pencil to set up 8552 / 1000 as a long division "problem." With simple ownership of the computing "trick" of moving decimal points, this becomes not a "problem" in any way, rather a mere mental "exercise."

What I want to empower the students to do is to make modifications to the above program, (as long as they employ "Save As..." to make a copy of it their own, and preserve my copy unchanged). While I don't expect most students to need to/want to/be able to manipulate the Math, Counter, and Display Blocks, I do that it is perfectly feasible to have them manipulate the settings in the configuration pane for the motor block, selecting different values for duration using the same units (seconds), or different units for duration. I would hope some would try out different power settings or different steering settings.

Some advanced students will undoubtedly want to add external sensors and test the robot's ability to use ultrasonic sensor settings to stop it before it crashes into the wall, or the touch sensor to stop it when it does encounter an obstacle.

Bottom line, I want to give kids some real hands-on ownership of data, and some real reasons to put math and higher-order thinking skills to work, solving real problems. This represents my understanding of what engineers do. I am a believer that by putting the LEGO Mindstorms Robotics System, and the NXT-G programming software into the hands of children as young as 8 years old, they can begin the journey towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers by discovering that math is "Life Skill" --a tool for solving real-world problems, not just something you do because some mean teacher makes you do these boring, meaningless worksheets during a specified time each day.