Mechanical Mania! Unit 2 Review
MJ j -
Hello all, and welcome to my ninth blog post.
As I continue to work on refining my draft, I said in my last post that I would show and explain Unit 2. Below are images of how the unit looks in my google document. As a reminder, if you are unable to see the images due to them being blurry, click here to go to the actual google document.
Unit 2, which I titled “Mechanical Engineering”, is one of the longer units, as you can see in the images below
This first image shows the first few topics covered in this unit. As it is assumed for the purposes of this class that nobody has prior experience with engineering, we start by defining what engineering even is. Spread throughout this unit are several notes, which I stylized as “NOTE:”. These notes are to make sure the instructor doesn’t delve into too many specific details. For example, in the note you can see in the image above, it mentions how the students don’t need to know what the “engineering design process” is in detail. Next, as you can see in the image, basic dynamic physics concepts are covered. This topic includes several simple calculations students will need to be able to do, as well as several basic unit conversions, which you can see in this image:
Further down the image, you can see the next topic is mechanical control systems, which is just a fancy way of saying the different ways a robot or part of a robot can move. Notice the note here as well. It says to focus mainly on the linear motion and oscillating motion. Linear motion due to it being simple as well necessary to understand other types of motion, as well as oscillating, due to the nature of wheel movements, and how most robots have wheels that they move on. Although most robots can move in a linear motion, there is also oscillating movement present.
This final image shows the end of the unit, which wraps up in the students first hands – on lab, this one focusing on the mechanics of movement. Although the lab says to use the VALINNY Robot Kit, this may or may not be the final robot that is actually used. I am currently exploring an alternative suggested to me by my project advisor, namely the Elegoo Smart Robot Car V4 which I have been told has more capabilities that would be useful for teaching mechanics compared to the VALINNY Robot. Again, I am still exploring this possibility, so I am open to any suggestions anyone might have. Either way, the kit used will have to be able to clearly show some aspect of mechanics we covered throughout the unit.
Next week, I will show what I have for Unit 3.
Until then,
MJ
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