In Affiliation with Tzu Chi Foundation, an international non-profit charity
COVID-19 Pandemic Online Class
2020-2021
For the school year of 2020-2021, Tzu Chi Robotics switched to holding its classes online in line with the typical non-quarantine schedule, and accordingly modified the curriculum to have a heavier focus on more theoretical aspects, such as the engineering design process, programming with RobotC Vexcoding Studio, and CADing in SnapCAD.
2020 Fall Semester
2021 Spring Semester
Unit 1: Vex IQ Part Recognition
For the first unit of this year, we focused on letting the students become first become used to the world of Vex IQ Robotics. Although the students had not yet learned the jargons of the engineering universe, having a first exposure to the actual materials used in Vex IQ Competition Robotics would make it much easier on the second run-through later along the year where the students would actually be able to apply their new knowledge of engineering to these parts and thus see them in a new light. I have found that this approach has been extremely effective in creating more longer-lasting impressions for the students.
Unit 2: Gear Ratios and their Applications
Integral to the world of engineering is the application of gear ratios, which are able to manipulate an input force and channel that to a myriad output uses. The foundation of movement in the professional world utilizes gear ratios, ranging from being present in cars to trains to airplanes to forklifts. In this second unit, we focused on learning the math behind gear ratios, such as in speed vs. torque, as well as ensuring that the student were encountering this subject from an intuitive standpoint.
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Unit 3: Mechanical Advantage
A discussion of gear ratios is not complete without the inclusion of Mechanical Advantage, which is a broader term for any type of energy and efficiency transfer from input to output. Personally, I found that this topic was notoriously difficult to grasp, and have found that students tend to agree. The reason for this is the wide variety of ways that MA can be expressed, and thus I made sure to include many examples to help drive this point home.
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Unit 4: Engineering Design Process
The engineering design process is central to being an engineer or simply participating in any engineering activity or project. It allows us to organize our thoughts, create a strong hypothesis to potentially solve a problem, and execute our experiments with scientific rigor to either support or reject our claims. It also teaches the valuable skill of self-reflection and introduces students to the usage of the decision matrix, an unbiased decision-making method.
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Unit 5: Robot Design Subsystems
Now that students have learned sufficient theoretical knowledge for the time being, they begin the transition to the physical application of this knowledge. In order to compete in Vex IQ Competition Robotics, students must build a working robot, and the key to building this is to break a complex design down into simpler structures, as as the key in general to any engineering project. Unit 5 covers the basic robot subsystems, of which there are three levels: chassis, lift, and object manipulator.
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Unit 6: RobotC Vexcode Programming
Nearing the end of the first semester of the school year, we shifted our focus onto programming, which constitutes the second major part of Vex robotics (the first being the physical building of a robot). Besides its use in robotics, programming is also bound to become a ubiquitous art in the near future. Giving an early exposure of coding to these students thus serves a double purpose.
This unit is the longest unit in this course, and has therefore been split into multiple chronological sections.
Section 1: Flowchart Logic and Basic Actions
The first section of Unit 6 consists of the basic logic behind programming, which includes using flowcharts to map out events and organizing the sample space of a particular action. Basic actions such as the basic controls of the robot drivetrain are also discussed.
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Section 2: Beginning Driver and Autonomous Controls
After becoming more comfortable with basics of programming, the students applied this new knowledge to the coding of the actual robot. This consists of driver control, where the robot directly responds to inputs from a controller, and autonomous, which is a section of the Vex competition where the robot only moves in accordance to already-programmed commands.
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Section 3: In-Class Coding Tournaments
To test for understanding of the programming concepts up to this point, we held many review activities, such as Kahoots and graphical organizers, and then held a tournament using the VR Vexcode Project coding studio for prizes (giftcards) and certificates.
Section 4: Miscellaneous Topics
This section consists of miscellaneous programming topics that, while important, do not completely fit in with the other topics in the curriculum. The topics covered here include turning scrub of a robot, the definitions of acceleration, velocity, and speed, and programming intuition.
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Section 5: Advanced Programming Techniques
Students are now starting to encounter programming problems and situations that require trickier, or sometimes more elegant, solutions that can only be done using coding techniques that have not yet been taught. In this last section we consider programming approaches such as If/Else functions, Loops, conditional statements, and sensors, among others. Vr.vex.com was used as the coding platform to illustrate these examples.
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Unit 6 Picture Highlights
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Unit 7: Computer-aided Design - SnapCAD
Our last unit of the year is learning the basics of computer-aided design through the use of SnapCAD. Students also completed their final project, which consisted of designing a complete robot using the knowledge they've accumulated throughout the year, notebooking their use of the engineering design process, and then CADing a depiction of their finished robot in SnapCAD.
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