Free Computing Resource: Junkbots and Scratch 1

The Junkbots project has been running for a number of years as an initiative to bring sustainability, computing and engineering together by building bots out of junk details of the project can be found at. https://junkbots.blogspot.com/. Junkbot is an extension of the Research into teaching problem-solving going on at the University of Northampton please feel to visit https://computingnorthampton.blogspot.com/2019/01/problem-solving-research-outputs-and.html for more details.

One of the criticism of the robot programming part of the Junkbots project is not everyone necessarily gets a go at the programming. To address this a new feature has been added to the project, using Scratch to play with the ideas. This is the first of a set exercises to play with these ideas. The cleaning robot shown is loosely based on the LEGO Mindstorms RCX.

The commands all in the My Blocks section

Exercise 1: Moving the Robot Cleaner around.:

Now go to https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/384342734 and rewrite the code so the robot moves in a square.

Exercise 2

Now go to https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/384347284 run the code (or try it below) and see what it does. Now alter the code in the RCX sprite to get the robot to push the purple drinks can across the line.

Please share and post comments on either the comments blog or on the scratch projects. It would be great to see how you do with this.

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

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