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 Photos by Heather Hill |
Matt Riddle (right) with robot "Melvin" and Trent Lawson (left), eying "Harvey," are ready for the Little LEGO 500's "in-lane" competition. Riddle and Lawson were two of the students who built autonomous robots from a LEGO kit for an introduction to computer science course.
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Belonging in an age bracket that marks me as a possible technophobe, I hesitate to write the words "fun" and "computer" in the same sentence. I come into my office daily fully expecting an ambush from the alien on my desk. The best I hope for is an uneasy truce.
So for me, the vision of beginning computer students building autonomous robots suggests horrific images not unlike scenes from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
No way!--so said Greg Hanek, coordinator of undergraduate courses in computer science and lecturer part time at Indiana University Bloom ington, and Matt Jadud, an IUB grad student who is an assistant instructor for CSCI A110--Introduction to Computing. The two are "event managers" for a new and unusual competition run in conjunction with IUB's famed Little 500--the Little LEGO 500.
The vehicles of choice in this case are robots designed by teams of A110 students and programmed to run two laps around a "prototype" track built from plywood and garden edging. The competition was held 12:30 p.m. April 23 with students, passersby, and stray faculty and staff viewing the inaugural event from the front steps and sidewalks of Lindley Hall. In addition, a good number of LEGO knights, princesses, farmers and soldiers also watched from VIP seating in the track infield.
"The robots are built using LEGO pieces," said Hanek. "Yes, those same LEGO pieces you may remember from your childhood, but with a twist. LEGO recently introduced a robotics kit that is relatively inexpensive and has a great deal of potential for learning."
Students from the class volunteered for Project Little LEGO 500. They've met on Fridays since mid-February for an extra three-hour lab every week. Previous computer experience varied among the students, but almost all of them had played with LEGOs.
"The kit is a mess of pieces--everything from your standard bricks to gears, pulleys and beams that allow you to build fairly complex mechanical devices," Jadud said. "The most notable part of the kit is the RCX, or LEGO Programmable Brick, as it is sometimes referred to.
"The RCX is basically a large brick with a few buttons for selecting programs in memory, running them and viewing the state of the inputs. Those inputs might be touch sensors or a light sensor capable of reading shades of grey," Jadud said. "The kit also comes with two motors, which combined with the interactivity of the sensors, allow you to move your robot around and cause it to interact with, pick up, run away from, move towards, follow and generally cause trouble with many things in its immediate environment."
Four robots were entered in the races, which included time trials, in-lane competition and a free-for-all-no-rules-let-the-best-robot-win event.
Creativity and uniqueness of design were highly encouraged. And, said Jadud, the students were "rather concerned with style." "Melvin" from Team Robo Ventors, for example, was a rather chunky robot with projectile eyeballs preceding his front end by a couple of inches. Sporting little orange wings, he exhibited the fleet-footed speed of Mercury in winning the time trials in 5.6 seconds flat.
Other competitors were "Harvey" designed by Team LEGO Lords (driven by a LEGO Ninja who dropped his sword); "Queen" from Team Queen Elizabeth (audience favorite, greatly admired for her petulant refusal to cooperate); and "Slow" designed by Cool Running.
 Melvin, Harvey, Queen and Slow show a veteran technophobe that computers (and problem-solving and critical thinking) can be as fun as playing LEGOs on a spring afternoon with a bright group of undergraduates. |
"I view the LEGO labs as a natural outgrowth of the IU Multi-Campus Modular Computer Curriculum (MMCC), which was part of an IU Strategic Directions Initiative," he said. "The purpose of MMCC was to create an IU system-wide, non-major curriculum for computer science courses. The resulting courses have an emphasis on problem-solving and critical thinking.
"A110 is an introductory course," he continued. "But that doesn't mean that students can't rise to a challenge. We presented them with a series of increasingly difficult tasks. Building an autonomous robot was the last. We said, 'Here's a problem you need to solve and here are the tools you can use to solve it.'
"It doesn't get much more 'real world' than that."
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