“Dance Off” Lego Robotics Challenge – Moving at the Speed of Creativity

My middle school robotics students are having fun and learning a lot, working through the freely available Carnegie Mellon Lego Spike Prime Robotics curriculum unit on “Movement.” I have 6th, 7th and 8th grade students in this class. Since some students always finish faster than others, I’ve created an optional “Lego Robotics Bonus Challenge” for students, to design their own challenges for their classmates to attempt. This week, two of my students created a challenge they named, “Dance Off.”

Here is the challenge summary and requirements:

Dance Off Challenge (Lego Robotics) by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr

"Dance Off Challenge (Lego Robotics)" (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

In addition to creating the challenge, students have to record and share a video of their “TacoBot robot” (or in this case, pair of TacoBots) completing the challenge. Here’s their video. They recorded the video on an iPad, then added copyright-friendly music using iMovie for iPad:

This is the second Lego Robotics challenge I’ve added to our class website for “Bonus Challenges,” and the first student-created challenge! I created a “Red Road” challenge as the first example to get students started.