This year, with students sitting closer together and able to work cooperatively in small teams, our robotics unit was able to happen again! Having 5th graders mixed in with our 6th graders allowed me to change up our usual robotics unit with one that focused on space science. Using NASA’s Artemis mission to go back to the Moon I chose a lunar rover challenge concept. The Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit may be discontinued as Lego introduced their new, updated Mindstorms kit but we have so many EV3 kits that we are going to use them until they die completely! 
I started by adapting the following Artemis Mission slideshow to launch the project. I used Pear Deck to make the slides interactive. (Click here if the slideshow doesn’t show up below.)
Here is a copy of the handout I shared with students via Google Classroom. Scroll down to see the challenge descriptions for two challenges that student teams had to choose from:
I put together this Wakelet collection of resources for the Lunar Rover challenge and this Wakelet collection of resources for the Space Exploration Robotic Support challenge. And here are some notes that students shared with me that I thought were so cool!
I also put links to student robotics project Google Sites here.
Here are some videos I recorded of their final rover submissions! If we had more time we would have gone back to the programs to tweak the rovers and to make them truly autonomous but for the time they had to work on these I was pleased with their prototypes – after all, it’s the idea that matters!
Posted in Science by Alfonso Gonzalez Leave A Comment
