Class+no+1

In our first lesson, the robotics teacher, Mr. Emanuele, gave us an introduction on robots and how they work. We discussed how when you’re building a robot you need creativity, team-work and the ability to follow instructions very carefully. These are the basics in robot building, because without creativity you wouldn’t get any ideas on what to build or how to build it. Without team-work instead people can’t work together and change parts or help the ‘creator’ with anything that they need. Also you often need more than one person to build a robot, making team-work essential. The ability to follow instructions instead is important because without instructions you can lose important steps. After this discussion, we separated into groups of three or four. I was in a group with Nadia, Lyuba, Daniel, and Umberto. This in my opinion was a bad choice because we didn’t have a very good overall team-work. When this was done we selected a person (Umberto) to go chose five random Lego joints and pieces. Then we were given about 10 minutes to put them together into a weird shape or a ‘useless machine’. We ended up calling this the ‘Mulin’ (it was a name that meant absolutely nothing but it was the only thing we could agree on), and we gave it the function of being a catapult. We were next told to give our ‘useless machine’ to another group (going in a clockwise direction, the group ended up being the group of 11th grade boys) and we were given the ‘useless machine’ of the group to our right (made up of Alberto, Pietro, Riccardo and Luca) and we were told that without conversing with either of the groups whose ‘useless machine’ we either had or had given ours to, we were supposed to give the ‘useless machine’ that we now had a name and function. Then we were supposed to dismantle it and write good instructions on how to rebuild it. We named the machine the ‘Spinner’ (or the Football Foot as Umberto and Daniel wanted to call it) and gave it the function of being either a catapult or a crane. We had great difficulty righting the instructions on how to build this ‘useless machine’, and many disagreements on how to do it as well (we unfortunately had disagreements almost everything). We ended up with two versions of instructions and various drawings of the ‘useless machine’. When we were done with this we were told to dismantle the ‘useless machine’ and give the dismantled pieces and the instructions to the group to our left (the group that we had given the ‘Mulin’ to), and we received the dismantled pieces and instructions that the group to our right had done. These instructions were quite bad and we failed miserably into rebuilding the ‘useless machine’ that the group consisting of Francesca, Jacqueline, Francesco and Shubham had created. We also had made some very bad instructions, so we ended up helping the group of 11th Graders a lot in how to build the ‘useless machine’ we had been given. When we were done with all of this, we moved out of the computer lab where we had initially been located, and into room 308, where we were very crowded. Here each group stood up, and we saw how each ‘useless machine’ changed name, function and looks or features from one group to the next. We heard the difficulties that other groups had, and presented our findings and problems. Overall we all agreed that team-work is hard and so is righting good instructions. Even though it was quite difficult, it was extremely fun. Robots and humans are overall quite different. If we were to compare what we did in class to a living organism then our ‘useless machines’ could be seen as simple organisms, or molecules (not atoms because the ‘useless machines’ were made up of various parts not just one piece). Something that molecules and robots have in common is that neither one has a brain. Instead, a robot receives orders, while a molecule can only follow the laws of physics, such as the fact that when it is hotter expansion happens (molecules move more and take up more room). Something that is man-made versus something that is natural is different because what is man-made cannot think, it must follow commands, it won’t work if it is not given an order to follow, while something that is natural, even when it is not living, can change without a command, it can ‘alter it’s course’ in a certain sense. A robot instead can’t (yet) make a decision by itself, one day a child can’t decide that his doll that could walk suddenly can talk as well. A robot must be affected in one way or another by something to change, while something natural doesn’t have to. (I’m not exactly sure how to explain this, I hope I’ve made myself clear enough.)
 * //Lesson 1 – 17 September 2010 //**