Teach Engineering: Understanding Communication With a Robot

Student pairs first act out the instructions a robot is given with one person providing instructions and the other person following the instructions. This activity helps students understand how a robot is programmed and with what type of precision commands must be given. Then students program LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT taskbots to navigate a simple maze. The goal is to teach students that a robot's computer simply follows directions exactly as they are given, thus one must be very clear and logical with programming instructions.