SciBorg Day 1

If anyone has taken CS111, they may have been struck by the similarity between the Pico-software and the Buggle lessons that we first learn and program with.  I find that this type of very simple chain of commands is often used to teach children and get them interested in computer science and engineering.  It probably should not have been a surprise that the Pico-software was made for children.  Still, the software teaches important basic skills that perhaps children understand better than I do.

A. The first couple of tasks were obviously very simple.  We struggled slightly with making it spin right and left because we couldn't get the blocks to work how we wanted them to (my fundamental struggle in CS as well).  We understood that we had to get one wheel to move forward while the other moved backward.  I became hooked on the idea of using an if else statement but the blocks wouldn't allow it.  Eventually we figured out that we could instruct the car to move one wheel forward, move the other wheel backward, and then move both at the same time.  With this framework, we were able to make the SciBorg bear-right or left by setting the power of the opposite wheel to be slightly less than the other.

B. The most difficult part of this task was perhaps identifying how to use counta with the blocks (another fundamental CS struggle).  After we found the piece, everything else was fairly easy with the knowledge that we had gathered from the previous tasks.  Our borg was able to travel back to its original starting place after the code had run its course.  We did notice that using the counta code made our borg turn more to the left while the countb code was slightly straighter.

All and all, I'm excited to see how we'll be using these SciBorgs in the next week or so.  I've been interested in sensors and am excited to see how we'll be able to use them.  I hope we'll be able to use other types of code than this Pico-software but perhaps that will be much, much later...