This week I visited the incredibly awesome UTSA ITEC robot lab. This is the kind of place that you dreamed of in elementary school if, like me, you thought that “science” should involve something other than “filmstrips.” They have a 3-D printer! There are LEGOs everywhere! And, as an extra bonus, the chairs look like they belong on the set of Star Trek.
Mary Stowers, the curriculum specialist, showed me the lab’s LEGO Mindstorm robot kits. The kits look like regular LEGOs, up to the point of the motors, the sensors, and especially the brain, a giant LEGO block that can be connected to a computer with a USB cable and programmed with a drag-and-drop interface. In the robot lab, kids are posed challenges, like to create a robot car that will go five feet and stop inside a masking-tape square. The challenges go all the way up to very sophisticated designs that can sense different colors, pick up objects, take over the world…
With the Mindstorms, kids can experience engineering challenges firsthand. On their own, they discover principles like symmetry and the structural soundness of different kinds of shapes. Mary says this can be especially important to kids from chaotic backgrounds, because the robots reward them for learning to think systematically.
I’ve got two kits for the library now. The kids are maintaining a certain level of sophistication about them, but the adults are squealing shamelessly with glee, probably because we suspect that the “brain” brick – which is, technically, a toy – is more powerful than the onboard computer in the Apollo spacecraft. Hold onto your hats! There’s science ahead!
