Nice STEMs!
confidence that the rivet tool (which works a bit like
the back of a claw hammer) is a quick and painless
way to pave the way for a new design. Our only
concern is that the rivet tool itself is made of plastic,
so we were a bit apprehensive about its prospects
for long term durability.
This apprehension would be a perfect teachable
moment regarding material hardness. For all we
know, the tool is a step or two up from the rivets on
the Rockwell scale, and we never had any problems
with it during our numerous disassemblies.
For our final exam, we wanted to build the
balancing motorcycle. By working through the
design for it, we finally realized why the kit favored
individual AA battery holders to a more traditional
rechargeable battery back. The individual packs
could be distributed anywhere around the robot,
allowing you to make strategic placements for
weight distribution purposes or to achieve a
sleekness that might not be possible when saddled
with a big block of a battery.
The header board for the battery packs includes
sockets labeled both 9V and 6V, meaning that the robot
could get away with six or four AA batteries. With that
simple addition of the extra socket on the battery header,
the STEM kit creates another teachable moment that
encourages roboticists to take a step back and think about
power requirements. By positioning the batteries low on the
bot bike, the design had a low center of gravity and
balanced as well as a Flying Wallenda.
LIKE AN ANT FOLLOWING A TRAIL OF FOLIC ACID.
Report Card
After building three designs, we felt like we had a good
sense of the kit. Overall, we
were extremely impressed with
the curriculum that it came
with. The numerous lessons
did indeed focus on particular
applications of Science,
Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics, and the range of
designs possible with two
motors could fill up far more
than a semester’s worth of
class time. The curriculum is
well written and well paced,
and it’s something that would
seem equally at home in a
formal classroom setting or on
someone’s own time for
independent learning.
The STEM kit, however, is
not perfect — but no kit is. As
any roboticist knows, you
always learn so much more
from unexpected problems and
setbacks than anything else. That’s when the real problem-solving kicks in, and the instances of difficulty we
encountered when working through the STEM curriculum
were all great teachable moments.
A SUPER COOL BOT BIKE.
SERVO 01.2013 73