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.

How Binary Code works: a visual example

The older boys have done enough programming that they kind of understand the idea of binary code, and we also talked about it a bit with switches during our electricity unit. But I liked this activity (instructions here) for its very clear illustration of that binary on/off 1/0 dichotomy.

The idea is that you draw a picture, then superimpose it on graph paper. If the picture fills more than 50% of a given box in the grid, you put a "1" in that box. If it fills less than 50%, you put a "0."

Then you read off your grid numbers out loud, while the students recreate your drawing by filling in a box when you say "1" and leaving the box empty when you say "0."

A simple airplane picture looks like this in the grid.

It's a really obvious way to show how smaller pixels make a clearer picture, too. Above you can see the various iterations of a picture of a bunny. The original picture is on the left in pink. When you re-create it in binary with a large grid, you get the not-very-good blue bunny in the middle. But with a smaller grid (smaller pixels) you get the more-accurate grey bunny on the right.