Today, let’s look at what we do in the LEGO robotics class. This is actually the final session of the class and encapsulates everything we have learned until then. This session includes
- LEGO building challenge
- some very simple LEGO robotics coding
- and with only one simple equation, we explore the force that pulls everything to the ground (gravity) and even experimentally derive how strong this force is (gravity constant).
It doesn’t matter whether your child likes to build LEGO and doesn’t like to code. Some other kids like to code and not build LEGO. We work together as a team, and everybody can contribute whatever he/she is comfortable.
LEGO building
So, we’ll first have some fun building our LEGO model, which will look something like this. It has an arm up to that can hold a ball. At the bottom is a “bowl” where the ball will be caught with a pushbutton. The kids will learn how to build such a structure so that it doesn’t fall over 😉
Coding
The only little code we need to write is for the computer to open the arm up top (after which the ball will start to drop down). We’ll take a timestamp of that event.
And once the ball hits the pushbutton at the bottom, we’ll take another timestamp.
Now we can do our experiment and do this say 10 times and note down the time it takes for the ball to fall down.
This is quick and it’ll only be around 0.24 seconds
Physics
One simple equation from our good old friend Isaac Newton enables us to calculate the gravity constant if we know the time it takes for the ball to fall down (we have experimentally calculated that) and the distance (which we know from building the LEGO model).
Now we can calculate the gravity force, which will be somewhere around the 9.807 m/s2 mark
How cool is that???
The finished experiment looks something like this