Robot Design Challenge: This Design Challenge Is a Mirror on the World.
Harry T. Roman · 2004
Here is a fun design challenge you can use in your classroom or across the grades in your school. If you are a regional manager of a number of schools, you can challenge several schools to participate. No special tools, hardware, or supplies are needed, only imagination and teamwork. I have used this challenge with students and teachers who visited my robot application design lab; and I have applied it through Newark Museum, with local Newark schools participating. It's always a fun exercise that illustrates technology education principles. First, I'd like to present a little introduction and discussion. Introduction I often have the opportunity to talk to technology education students, teachers, and educators. Invariably, someone always asks me to identify the most important college courses I took. My answer is always a showstopper. Looking back at the audience in my very serious face, after an appropriate pause to make them believe that weighty thoughts are flashing through my mind, I boldly exclaim, The three most important courses I took were English, laboratories, and the humanities. After the quizzical looks are finished and the murmurs die down, I try to explain. English courses teach you how to communicate--a most fundamental skill in the work-a-day world ... bedrock for all employees. Labs teach you how to work with others, the necessary give-and-take between viewpoints, egos, and differing life experiences. But the toughest one for them to swallow is the humanities courses. Here I talk about the need to blend technology solutions with the non-technical aspects of life. New products must be safe, environmentally neutral, socially acceptable, and in conformance with institutional guidelines and governmental regulations. We go to college, I emphasize, not so much to study more of what we are good at, like technical subjects, but rather to discover, research, and learn more about what we don't know so well. humanities courses put the non-technical world in perspective, establishing boundaries for us to design within. Were our educational system more integrative, stressing multi-dimensional thinking and the interweaving of subjects, my answer probably would not appear so unexpected. But the curriculum is fragmented, highly specialized, often blurring the rich interfaces existing between subjects. It is to correct this pizza pie slice approach to education, and illustrate the multi-dimensional aspects of problem solving a la technology education that I have developed the design challenge described below. Design Challenge This challenge stems from an exercise I originally did with Grades 3-5 at my robot design and application lab in central New Jersey. I would invite local schools to bring teachers and students into the lab twice a month to have teams of students see and actually operate mobile robotic devices I was developing--and then have these students try to design a personal robot to assist a physically challenged person. It was a most popular activity with both students and teachers. It took about 2-3 hours to hold the design challenge, and winners received a robot t-shirt. All told, I estimate about 1000 students and teachers took the challenge. And yes, the students always blew the teachers away with their designs. It wasn't even close in most cases. When my robot design lab completed its mission and was closed, I still wanted to use the design challenge with students. I no longer had real robots for them to see, touch, and operate, but I felt the challenge could still be used with excellent results. Here is an interesting way we kept this great activity going. Working with the in-service educational instructors of the nationally recognized Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey and local Newark School teachers, we redesigned the program to be a more intense two-week activity. winning teams from a number of schools and classes involved (mostly the 3rd through 6th grades) displayed posters of their designs at the Museum, where judges assembled to select the best ones, and awarded savings bonds as prizes. …