Lego Mindstorms

We deliberated for a long time before getting the Lego Mindstorms robots, because they are expensive! But we finally decided to use some school money to get this kit. Sam convinced me that the study of robotics is important enough in many future science-related careers that it would be a good investment for our children. And so far, we love it! Abe (age 12) has been learning HTML from a book he got for Christmas, and he also has learned Scratch with Boy Scouts, so the Lego programming language was really easy for him to pick up. But Seb (age 9), who didn't have a lot of prior experience, has been able to learn a lot about programming too. 

They have built the robots from the instruction manuals, but they especially love building their own robots and programming them. And Malachi (age 7) likes to watch and help the older boys program, and especially to use the remote control to move the robots around. They are really fun and I'm glad we bought them.

I particularly liked this cute little guy.

Assembly lines, industrial robots, and robotic arms

The most common kind of robot today, it turns out, is the robotic arm—the kind used in manufacturing. Unimate, the first robot, was made to work on an assembly line at General Motors. There are two main kinds of industrial robots: gantry robots (which move on an X, Y, Z axis, usually from an overhead frame) and SCARA robots which are fixed at the bottom and move with more degrees of freedom. You can see a comparison of the different types here, and also here and here.

We watched these two "How it's made" videos to see some robotic arms in action:

Circuit boards

Airplane wings

Really, almost any of the "How it's made" videos will show a robotic arm at work!

To illustrate the concept of assembly lines (each robot/machine/worker does one specific task and can therefore become maximally efficient at it), we decorated robot-face cookies with an assembly line. Each person put on one type of decoration and then moved the cookies down the line.

The children got pretty good at their jobs, if not quite as good as real robot workers :)

Next, we made Lego robots and had them make things on assembly lines. These little robot workers were so cute:

And so hard-working!

But Sebby's robotic arm (SCARA robot) was even more true-to-life.