Project information
Project goals
The goal of the project was to create a learning activity for secondary school students including the concepts of Participatory Design and Computational Empowerment, using LEGO Mindstorms as a tool.
Idea
Originating from a childhood story about falling things, we are trying to measure the times different objects need in order to fall to the ground: through that, we will talk about gravity and air resistance whilst making it visible. After that we can use the time of objects that overcome the air resistance to measure our gravity, resulting in a combination of seen, felt, observed and calculated physical daily phenomena.
Digital Story
Race to the Bottom - Digital Story.mp4
The script for the digital story was created based on the above idea, and animated using Canva and its freely available licensed resources.
Target group
The activity is aimed at 3rd grade secondary students (AHS or MS). The following points of the 3rd grade physics curriculum are relevant here:
Energy, fields, forces and interactions
Analyse and explain natural phenomena, formulate scientific questions and hypotheses
Model and interpret data through mathematical and physical models
Mechanics: Qualitatively investigate, document and communicate the impact of different forces observed in everyday life
Learning objectives
Students can use LEGO Mindstorms to execute their own ideas.
Students can develop and execute ideas to investigate the topics of gravity and air resistance.
Students can find conclusions regarding gravity and air resistance from their experiments.
Students can name the fields of knowledge they used in order to create their robot.
Students are aware of their abilities of problem evaluation, decomposition, abstraction, generalisation and algorithm design.
Impact of the topic
The concept of objects falling under gravity is a familiar one, but many students might not have given it much thought if it hasn’t come up during regular physics lessons yet. Achieving the shift from an everyday to a scientific perspective is one of the goals of the activity.
Working with LEGO Mindstorms should also promote the students‘ problem solving skills and motivate them by giving them a feeling of competency upon achieving their goals.
Exploring and explaining the topic
An advantage of the chosen subject matter is that the concept of dropping something is intuitively obvious and doesn’t need further explanation – students can focus on how to build a dropping mechanism with the materials at hand. The experience and data they gather building and testing their mechanism can then be integrated in a mathematical and scientific explanation of the topic, which should result in a natural and motivated learning process.
Implementing the activity
The central question of this lesson is how to measure the speed of a falling object. Students are shown the digital story as an introduction and inspiration, posing the question why a leaf falls slower than a tree. The activity is planned as a half-day trip to the CE-LAB. The students are divided into small groups, and each group is given a LEGO Mindstorms set to experiment with and ample time to execute their ideas. At the end of the activity, there is some time for the groups to present their findings and discuss what they learned.
Participatory Design issues
The activity is designed with Participatory Design in mind, allowing students to develop their own solutions to the problem. A possible issue regarding this style of teaching is that students who are possibly discouraged in topics of STEM, such as female students, are often overlooked and disinterest is attributed as a personal choice.
When inviting students to a project week where they self-register it’s important create invitations that are equally inviting to both boys and girls, possibely favouring girls' interests.
The groups of students should be left to divide themselves in the groups they are most comfortable with. When working in their groups students are encouraged to find ways of working they find appealing.
Computational Empowerment
When designing this activity a wide variety of themes are incorporated through the context. This project adresses consequences of digital literacy, digital citizenship and autonomy in digital realms and applies concepts of Computational Empowerment.
Through digitalisation we all need to be able to understand that the digital world actively affects how we live and the decisions we make. Becoming literate in creating code and creating artifacts to support this allows students to understand how digital products are created and might also affect our personal lives. Every student should be aware of their own rights and be able to discern whether the products they use are working in their own interest.
Additionally, having a setting where students solve a problem helps them learn the five CE skills. They become more fluent in identifying
1) problems and being able to compartmentalise them
2) how to create repeatable solutions,
3) how to decide wether solutions are effective,
4) how to simplify processes and
5) how to take previous solutions and reimplement them.
Allgemeine Informationen
Lehrveranstaltung
PS Development Spaces - Educational Robots and Social Diversity
Semester
Sommersemester 2024
Lehrender
Pelin Yüksel Arslan PhD
Projektbeteiligten
Elias Gailberger, Florian Gutmann, Wolfgang Miksits (Team "Bionicles")
Testing the activity
Preliminary tests
Single big trapdoor design Faster double door Sensor assembly
(too slow)
Dropper design v2
Having a single motor handle Dropper v2 (good for bricks, Dropper v2 (empty)
both doors (too weak) too small for light objects)
Dropper v2 (open)
Dropper v2 (closed)
Building the tower
Adapting standard LEGO Back of the tower Front of the tower, with
blocks to the LEGO Technic assembled Mindstorms parts
system
Finished tower
...with insert for dropping ...with loaded "heavy object" ...with empty platform ...with loaded "light object"
LEGO bricks (Post-it note)
Mindstorms code used in the successful tests
Final test
lego_drop_heavy.mp4lego_drop_light.mp4
Dropping something heavy Dropping something light
Evaluation
Difficulties
Difficulties that arose during our testing of the activity were firstly the length of the cables. Having them in only one fixed size, expensive to reorder for potential hardware hacking and fairly short really limits machines that try to have a bigger size.
We used a second sensor from another kit, so it wouldn’t even be possible make it with one Lego kit.
Using one sensor was very inaccurate and couldn’t deliver results that were good enough to work with further.
The plastic piece bouncing out of the sensor area was solved by using the instruction manual as a dampening device, therefore still only using original Lego components.
The AI image generation posed difficulties with creating consistent character design, and had problems creating moving images, prompting us to use Canva and stock footage as opposed to AI content.
Limitations
LEGO Mindstorms might not accessible to every class due to its pricey nature, one set being 434,- via betzold.at at this moment. Thinking about doing it with an entire class would probably multiply the cost by 4 or 5 to still not have a too big group size. Therefore, it could be necessary to do an excursion if the kits are not a feasible option to one’s
particular school. This is also why the activity is designed around a visit to the CE-LAB, and even then it is infeasible to let a whole class participate - dividing a whole class onto 4 Mindstorms kits would lead to impractical group sizes.
The excursion offers new information to the students whilst being very incompatible with an ordinary timetable, still leaving it as a possibility for a specialty workshop at the end of the year or similar, but still limiting if the school isn’t implementing a system like that.
Potential uses for the future
This activity can set a first contact with „out of school“ makerspaces and therefore offers a new set of tools, often unobtainable by a lot of educational facilities.
It can be implemented as one „end of the school year“ intensive course, creating a visible connection point for the arts & crafts and physics teachers to cooperate. Having it in an external space could also make students see their potential interest in working in the research field due to the investigative Nature and the appearance of the CE-Lab.
By having an eye on the female students‘ interactions with the material it could be a possible groundwork to empower future women in stem and set the stage for gender balance in this sector.