Need More Ideas?   Have More Ideas for Challenges – send them our way!

 

Tufts’  LEGO Engineering and several sites  have some ideas – here are some additional ideas/suggestions via Dr.  Ken Berry (UT, Dallas):

 

1. Write your name with a robot– just attach a pen to the middle of the robot. You can make this more difficult by creating an attachment to lift and drop the pen onto the paper. You may try to draw a house or something else easier for beginners.

2. Can, Can– place cans inside a circle and create a robot to push them out the fastest. I recommend a circle at least 4 ft in diameter and 20 cans. This is a good challenge for the students to learn a loop, i.e., find the line, back up, turn, find the line again.

3. Modified Can, Can– Place a circle inside the circle and move the cans from the outside circle to the inside circle. If you have crafty students they may create a long arm and swing it to win at Can, Can. This modification forces them to be more creative with their building and programming.

4. Sumo– Push another robot out of a circle. Robot must sense the line and move away from it. Hopefully, the robot will be able to identify another robot and move toward it but not beyond the line. This challenges center of gravity and torque.

5. Combat Robots– You need to be careful with this one. You need to protect from flying objects. The robots go after each other until one is immobilized, like on its back or wires removed.

6. Easter Egg challenge- Find ping-pong balls and try to return them to a basket. You can call this many other things like Mars Sample Return if you want it to sound more macho.

7. Robot Zoo– create animals with the robot. Penguin that waddles, roaches that avoid light, snake that uncoils and strikes, dog that barks, etc.

8. Synchronized dancing robots– this works best if the robots can communicate with each other over bluetooth or some other means.

9. Firefighting robot– find the fire and use a squirt gun or snuffing device to put it out.