l e g o s, r o b o l a b,and lab v i e w（l e g o s,r o b o l b,我实验室v e w）（6页）.docVIP

LEGOS, ROBOLAB, and LabVIEW: Designing, Programming, and Collecting Data at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepared for The Institute on Learning Technology part of the Spring 2001 This quicklook also is available from the Learning Through Technology web site, /nise/ilt/ LEGOS?, ROBOLAB, and LabVIEW: Designing, Programming, and Collecting Data Chris Rogers Associate Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering Tufts University-Medford/Somerville Campus Medford, Massachusetts crogers@ Why use technology? Because it’s fun. I run a mechanical engineering class that teaches students how to do data acquisition—how to design and build an experiment. We do it all with LEGOs?, the colorful children’s construction pieces, and LabVIEW, the software that guided and collected the data from NASA’s Sojourner Rover robot on the Mars Pathfinder Mission. LEGO? car in a maze If students have to make projects in the machine shop, they can’t make very complicated parts. With LEGO? bricks, they can prototype far more quickly, and the complexity of the part correspondingly increases. The same is true with the software; LabVIEW allows rapid software prototyping and students can develop much more complicated software without many of the difficulties associated with a syntactical language (like C). Then you have a pretty powerful combination. By letting students create the experiment themselves, rather than giving them a canned experiment, you can get them more excited about and more involved in what they’re learning. The courses I’ve used the LEGOs? in a class called Introduction to Mechanical Engineering, which is a required class for sophomores, with between 40 and 60 students every year. I also teach a freshman Robotics course with about 30 students and a senior Robotics course with high-level algorithm development and distributed intelligence, which usually has only about five or six students. I use the LEGOs? and the LabVIEW software in