Servo - January 2013

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.