Hi, James here.
I’m back this year and with a new class! The people in this years Mindstorm class are Tamsin, Sara, Oliver and Me (Obviously). For this lesson, we just learnt stuff about the Ultrasonic Sensor and the Light Sensor to remember the important things. (Because there are two new coders). We also learnt a bit about pseudocode (Which I know about).
So we firstly looked at the line follower made by Josh last year. The line follower was really basic because the robot wiggled a lot. But when we used the 2 sensor line follower the robot didn’t wiggle as much as the basic line follower. I made a table to show the people reading how the 2 sensor line follower works.
You can look at the table here
When we were looking at the light sensor we also looked at how much light was reflecting from a certain colour. We tried it on green, black and white. White reflected about 80% of light, black reflected about 10% of light and green reflected about 20% of light. We found that out by using the Port View on the robot.
We also looked at the Ultrasonic Sensor. The Ultrasonic sensor is a sensor that sends sound waves till it hits an object and then it comes back to the sensor at a speed of 343 meters per second! We’ll use that sensor for locating the can (AKA the person who needs to be rescued). Last year Oliver, Josh, and Brayden used variables to find the can and push it out. By, locating the can, seeing how many degrees to spin till the sensor can’t detect the can then dividing that number of degrees by 2, the robot will turn back that many degrees to push the can out. I did the Can Finder challenge a different way. I used the turn motor block to spin the robot in only one direction then when it locates the can, the robot will push it out of the “Chemical Spill”.
For the new kids joining this year they had to do a challenge on Scratch. To do it you had to use variables. The meaning of a variable is:
A container with a name that stores important information. ( e.g The score in a game of Pac Man)
Sara said, “That there were different variable types”, “one is an ordinary variable (Like the one I gave the meaning on), another one could be a list, and another could be a collection”.
Before I go, I will always put a word of the day in. Today’s word of the day is…
Ascetic – Extreme self discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons.
Bye. See you next time I blog about my newest Mindstorm adventures…