Teacher/Mentor Notes

The purpose of this Challenge is firstly to help students "personalize" their robots by adding faces and voices. We have observed that this personalization greatly assists the student's imagination. We have already told the students that, for this lesson, they will be the teachers and their robot pets will be their students. This transfer to teacher role places the students into a role they see as prestigious, and encourages their participation to a much greater extent than we initially expected. They seem delighted at the prospect that their robotic students will do exactly what they tell them to do, without answering back!

Secondly, their task is to teach their "robotic students" to approach the Alien (estimating distance), wait for a period, and retreat to their starting position, all the while using appropriate robotic expressions and verbal utterances.

Students with differing abilities can be catered for with this Challenge. Since the "Robotic students" travel only in straight lines forwards and backwards, the very simple first robot build (which produces a robot that does not have a separate steering axle) is preferable for this role. Since it so quick to build, we have found that even the slowest of our non-handicapped students can complete this build and get results in one lesson. The more able students can use this same robot in an "around the moon attempt" while the others catch up (providing these faster students with background experience that will be useful later on when they try "around the moon" with a different robot that does have steering wheels).

Further notes that contain background suggestions regarding Alien references, a suggested construction of both the Alien and the Alien arena, and additional notes on programming the "Robotic students" in NXT-G, can be seen in pdf format by clicking here.

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