For our first lab activity in this class we conducted a lego robot activity, which was awesome because I love legos and robots are pretty cool too! During this activity we each worked with a partner (mine was molly!) and were given a kit which included all the things needed to create this lego robot. The first step of the activity was to literally build this robot. We were given a guide to help us put together this robot but it definitely wasn’t as easy as just following some directions. The robot was in the form of a car, once it was finished. It was given to us as just a simple block, we then had to attach that battery which later “fueled” the robot to move! Once that was complete we had to put the wheels, which was a trying task but once we figured out the correct way it put them on it began to look more like a robot! Our next task was to assure that all other parts of the legos and robots were placed in the correct spots so that nothing fell off or was missing later in the project. We then had to make sure the required wires were connected and all in the right spots, this is important because the wires are a key necessity later on when we wanted the robot to start moving. Once the robot was built we connected it to the computer and used the required programs to set it up so that we could control and operate the robot from the computer. After playing around for a while we got the robot to move! And later on we got it to go in a circle and it was pretty awesome i must say. We then found the measured distance of the robot which was 29 cm= .29 m and the programs distance which was .129m and the fractional error was .161m. The equation is listed below.
.29-.129 .161
__________ _____
(.29*.129) .209
__________
2
%error=.77
Over all this was a successful and exciting project and very interesting as well. We learned a lot about the mechanics involved in what actually made these little guys go!