Physics With Robotics - Using LEGO MINDSTORMS In High School Education

Integrating robotics activities in science curriculum provides rich opportunities to engage students in real world science and help them to develop conceptual understanding of physics principles through the process of investigation, data analysis, engineering design, and construction. In addition, students become more confident learners and develop better problem-solving and teamwork skills. In this paper we describe a successful use of LEGO MINDSTORMS in designing robotics-based activities for teaching high school physics classes. Students design and perform novel science investigations with a toolset that helps them achieve a high reproducibility in their experimental designs. Several example projects that utilize LEGO MINDSTORMS are presented. Physics with Robotics Based on the authors’ experience, students have difficulty learning for learning’s sake, especially in physics classrooms. Students thrive, exhibiting a great deal of enthusiasm and ownership, however, when they have an applied, real world challenge such as an engineering problem to solve or a novel science investigation to perform. By allowing them to solve problems where the answer is not already on an answer sheet somewhere, students learn confidence, problem-solving, teamwork and gain a better understanding of the underlying concepts. Engineering problems, based on real-life situations, provide students with meaningful reasons to learn new material and a powerful educational framework that gives them an opportunity to transfer their knowledge to new situations (Rogers, 2009). Use of engineering problems also helps to focus students’ attention on the process as well as the final outcome. Novel science investigations provide students with opportunities to create hypotheses, build experiments, generate models to represent findings, Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. draw conclusions, and communicate their results (Charney et al., 2007, Collins et al., 1989). All of these are essential inquiry skills that students should learn and can be as useful to the student as the content itself (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1989). Robotics gives students opportunities to represent their ideas in different ways and utilize 3D artifacts (robots) to contextualize their learning and help them communicate their ideas and understandings. As students learn new material, mastery comes when they can represent their ideas in different ways such as writing, math, construction, and verbal debate (Goldin & Shteingold, 2001). Well designed activities using robotics give students rich opportunities to write about their ideas; utilize mathematical tools and represent their findings via mathematical models; construct 3D artifacts that embody their ideas and solutions; and engage in verbal debate as they work through robotics based design problems and science investigations. The utilization of 3D artifacts such as robots allows students to contextualize their knowledge and provides them with communication opportunities involving direct discussion of the artifact as well as gesturing and pointing to the artifact (Roth, 1996). In his book, Making Learning Whole, David Perkins discusses the importance of introducing students to the “whole game” rather then isolated pieces of a discipline (Perkins, 2008). To account for the subject complexity, the role of the educator is to create entry points for students appropriate to their learning progression. Adding robotics activities to science classes provides students with opportunities to play the “whole game” and engage in real world science through design, construction, and testing of their own experiments. They perform novel science investigations with a toolset that helps them achieve a high level of precision in their measurements and reproducibility in their experimental designs (Church, Ford, & Perova, 2009). There are many such toolsets available, but we will concentrate on the LEGO MINDSTORMS kit because it provides students and