Thomas Elias Cocolios edited sectionThe_ISOLDE_Ro.tex  over 7 years ago

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\section{The ISOLDE Robot project}  The project as originally proposed was to address misconceptions about nuclear physics among 14-16-year-olds by inviting ten local schools to participate in a competition to design and build a LEGO\textregistered{} Mindstorms\textregistered{} robot. It was planned that a trained student ambassador would visit each school to give an introductory class workshop on nuclear research and the use of robots to handle nuclear material at ISOLDE, and that the schools would then be loaned a Mindstorms\textregistered{} Education kit. The kits consist of 585 LEGO\textregistered{} elements, a programmable “brick”, and a number of motors, wheels and sensors (which respond to colour, orientation or distance from an obstacle). The sensors and other elements can be connected to the brick in many different combinations, and the brick can then be programmed from the Mindstorm\textregistered{} app, which uses blocks of code in a similar way to the programming language Scratch.\\  The intention was that following the introductory workshop, each school would put together a team of up to four students to design and build a robot capable of locating a “radioactive” Lego LEGO\textregistered{}  block, lifting it and transporting it to a given spot. This would be an ongoing project, so probably best suited to after-school STEM clubs, and the student ambassadors would be available virtually to provide support. Each team would then attend a competition event on the university campus to test their robots.\\ The competition element was phased out early in the project due to lack of sign-up from schools – this seemed to be due to teachers’ concerns about the time needed to design and build the robots and/or lack of experience or confidence in using Mindstorms\textregistered{}. It was also considered that in the original proposal, the practical programming side of the project only reached the small team put forward by the school. It was therefore decided to redevelop the whole-class workshops, training undergraduate student ambassadors to deliver an entirely student-led workshop, taking all ten Mindstorms kits into a classroom and allowing pupils to work in teams of 3-4 to program one of ten identical pre-constructed robots. Asking pupils only to program the robots rather than build one meant that the workshop could be contained into a 1-2 hour lesson slot, which feedback from teachers had indicated was a priority in fitting these into a school timetable.\\