I have had so much fun coaching FLL! If you are thinking about doing it, I can’t emphasize enough what a valuable experience this is for children. Since I’ve also been doing my students teaching in a high school physics classrom while coaching robotics, I’ve seen the problems with expecting students to follow an assigned curricula. There is no motivation. In the FLL classroom, students can’t help but learn. The challenges are fun and the kids are motivated to solve them through trial and error. Especially if you have kids that want to go into STEM fields later in life, I highly recommend FLL. We are so lucky that FIRST exists!

Here are some key lessons I learned during my inaugural season. I hope some of them are helpful to you.

1. Clean your wheels!

If the mission you are trying to solve relies on your robot traveling a precise distance, you want your wheels to grip the mat the same way every time. Slipping is death! We missed what would have been our top score at one of our tournaments by a mere millimeter and the grime on our wheels was 100% to blame for this. As soon as I cleaned it up with a hand sanitizing wipe it started behaving the way it had in practice.

2. Make sure kids know how to pass the robot. 

In the loud, anxiety-producing environment of a tournament, accidents will happen. During our practice round at the competition, one child hurriedly tried passing the robot to another child who wasn’t ready. The robot fell and broke into 4 or 5 pieces just seconds before they were about to go on. (Thankfully we had a backup!) I think I will be telling this story for years to come to make sure kids know how important it is to make sure the person that is receiving the handoff is ready!

3. Speaking of anxiety, try playing an applause/cheering YouTube track in the background when the kids practice.

There’s nothing like being at a real competition, but this can help them be a little more prepared for the intensity that they will feel when they are at the real thing! 

4. If at all possible, have a backup robot!

See #2. 

5. Also, have a USB key with all of your programs backed up.

You never know what will happen! See #6.

6. Do not, I repeat DO NOT, switch computers between practice and the tournament.

I tried to make a minor change to one of the programs at a tournament only to have the Spike Prime update and delete ALL the programs on the robot. Thankfully, I had the programs backed up and could quickly add them back onto the robot. (Thank you, #5!) However, the maximum speed of the robot was slightly different after the update and all of our codes were a little off. I eventually figured out that connecting the robot to computer with a newer version of the Spike Prime app caused the update. It’s hard to know exactly what version of the app each individual computer is using, so in the future, I will never switch mid tournament!

7. Set your speed and acceleration in each of your programs.

Even though I honestly believe the update affected our robot’s maximum speed in a way I don’t yet know how to control, it is still a good idea to slightly lower your robot’s maximum speed and acceleration for precision movements! These changes will slow the robot down but also make its behavior more repeatable. If you are just returning to home base or need to slam into a wall, go ahead and increase the speed back up to save those few precious seconds!

8. Speaking of precision, you need to be using the gyro for precision missions!

It is frustrating for the kids when the robot seems to behave differently each time you run it. Our teams had an advantage in that both my co-coach and I have a lot of experience programming. We knew how to make use of the gyro sensor. I’m planning to add some tutorials to the blog soon so you can avoid some of those frustrations as well! Stay tuned!

9. Think outside the box.

Watching how other teams completed missions at the tournaments gave us ideas for extra ways to earn points. We were able to implement some of these changes between qualifiers and regionals. Remember that you don’t need to solve the missions the way the designer intended. All that matters is the configutation of the table when the time runs out. At our very first meeting of the season, the veteran coach I was working with had the kids brainstorming different ideas for how they could solve each mission. This is SUCH a valuable practice! We will definitely spend more time strategizing out-of-the-box strategies earlier in future seasons.

10. Remember the robot game itself is only a small piece of FLL.

I’ll be honest, the robot game is all I really cared about. It’s the part that seems the most fun to me, so it is definitely where we put our focus throughout our team meetings. However, once you get to the tournament, the Innovation Project, the robot design presentation, and the way the team demonstrates their core values have equal weight. Even though one or our teams got a trophy for coming in 3rd in the robot games, they did not advance to the Championships. I still need to learn more about how those decisions are made, but in the future, we will put a little more thought and effort into the 3 judging categories as well! Our innovation project actually turned out amazing and is leading to us starting a chess club in our small town, but this didn’t come about into AFTER the tournaments, because we put it off to focus on the game.

I hope some of these FLL coaching tips were helpful to you in your FIRST LEGO League journey! Feel free to reach out if you have questions!

Related Links

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My goal for this series of challenges is to only use pieces that come in the LEGO Spike Prime Education set. (That’s the big yellow box.) For the actual competition, I suspect we’ll want the expansion set so that we can build a multi-functional robot. However, even the missions that are part of the competition can all be done one at a time with these basic pieces. There is a TON of robotics that kids can learn from just the base Spike Prime Education set.

This challenge in particular requires a skill that is extremely useful in the FLL competition world. Namely, to build an attachment using gears to create an arm of the robot that can operate in a particular way. That was also the intent of my knocking over a tower challenge. However, while that one could hypothetically be solved without creating an arm that moves, this one would be much more tricky.

This one is also slightly more challenging than the previous tower-knocking challenge, because the gears need to turn in different places. One gear will lie flat and the other will stand vertically in order to get that up-and-down motion. Of course, kids could redesign their robots completely, but I’m assuming that they start with the base robot described here.

The challenge and my solution in particular will be described in detail below. In case you have missed any of the previous challenges in this 6-part series, here they are for your reference. If you want to be notified of future challenges, feel free to sign up for my newsletter!

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square (*this post*)

Spike Prime Challenge: Lifting a Square Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 20 minutes, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Medium to Hard
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

The challenge is fairly straightforward. First, set up the starting and target squares as in the Moving a Square challenge. Next create a structure in the target square as shown. The two solid yellow pieces from the Spike Prime Education set will support the blue rectangular frame. (I realize now that I should have called this challenge Lifting the Quadrilateral, not Lifting the Square. )

Once everything is set up, the challenge is to completely remove the blue piece from the two yellow pieces holding it up without knocking over the yellow pieces. If kids get clever and build an attachment that simply pushes it off, congratulate them on their success, then specify that they now have to take the blue frame back to the starting square once they remove it. (This would REALLY replicate a FLL challenge.) By requiring them to pick up the piece and move it somewhere else, odds are that they will find a solution requiring them to create a rotating lever arm.

My Solution

This is the most challenging of these initial series of challenges by far! The kids have to think 3 dimensionally to see how a gear rotating in a horizontal plane can be used to create a level that will move in a vertical plane. (Of course, the kids can always re-design the base robot so that the gear is vertical. I don’t like to remove any options from the table!) All that to say, if you or your child needs to look at my solution for ideas, don’t feel bad! We all learn by modeling others.

As with the distance sensor for navigation challenge, I’m going to start by first showing you three different attachments. The first was built by my 9 and 11-year old, but it didn’t quite fit on the robot, though it still worked, as you’ll see. The next one was my 13-year-old’s design which removed the issue that my younger kids were experiencing. The last one was designed by me, where I took my 13-year-old’s design (yes, I realize I took the easy way out ), but then I arguably improved it by simplifying it.

Here is my younger kid’s design. They figured out that to get the arm to move up and down, you have to interlock the gears perpendicular to each other. I really admire the simplicity of their design. However, you’ll notice that the gear hits the hub, causing the axel to bend slightly. Despite this, they were able to complete the challenge!

Next, here is my teen’s attachment. He took the originally attachment that the younger kids made and redesigned it so that it would fit onto the car better. This one also works, though it is slightly more complicated!

Here’s my design after I started with my oldest’s and removed the pieces I felt were unnecessary:

And here is my code! Note that I finally got around to figuring out how far one rotation would move the car and adding in a line of code so that I could tell the car exactly how far to go. There was still quite a bit of trial and error, however!

Good luck completing this challenge! If you’d like to share pictures of your attachment with me, I’d love to see them!

Related Links

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This is my first year acting as a FIRST LEGO League Challenge coach. However, last year my oldest participated in the competition and I got to see how everything played out. (That was what made me realize how FUN this competition could be. And, of course, educational.) I’m not sure how the high school competition works, but at least for this 4th through 8th grage age group, nearly all of the missions involve, first, driving the car to a desired location and, second, pushing on levers or surfaces in a variety of ways. This challenge replicates exactly those objectives.

For your reference, here is a list of all the challenges I’ve either written so far or plan to write up soon. I’m sure this list will grow over time, so feel free to sign up for my newsletter if you’d like to stay up-to-date. (Note that if you have no experience using a Spike Prime, my getting started series of 5 posts might be a better place to begin.)

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower (*this post*)
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square

Spike Prime Challenge: Knocking Over a Tower Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 20 minutes, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Medium to Hard
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

The first step is to build a tower. I used all the regular LEGO bricks that came wth my yellow kit and attached them to a wider base. You will want to place this tower inside the destination square.

I actually had two different levels of this challenge for my own kids. The first level was simply to knock over the tower in the targe square. However, my kids quickly realized that they could just drive into it to knock it over, which is not what I was going for. That was totally fine though, because I congratulated them, then added further restrictions to make the challenge more difficult. As far as they knew, I planned it that way.

The real point of this challenge, as I envisioned it, was for them to build an attachment using the gear in the front of the bot to knock over the tower by swiping from the side. Therefore, if you’d like to make this challenge a little more difficult for your kids, tell them that the wheels of the bot cannot cross the blue line. Therefore, they have to build something that extends from their bot.

They might just build a jousting pole. In that case, tell them that they have to approach the bot from the skinny side, which will make jousting more difficult. Or you could put obstacles around the two sides that you don’t want them to approach from so they have to try knocking it over from one of the sides that is facing the skinny side of the tower.

With my kids, I actually just explained the type of attachment I wanted them to build (basically a windshield wiper that lays horizontal.) Since my oldest had already participated in FIRST LEGO League last year, he knew exactly what I meant. For my younger kids, I both explained what I wanted and helped them get started by showing them how to place a gear next to the first gear to build at attachment that would rotate in that direction. Feel free to look at my solution for ideas if your kids are getting stuck!

My Solution

The first step was to build an attachment using the gear at the front of the bot. Since the gear already rotates in the direction that we want out attachment to move, this is a fairly straightforward process, though kids might not see the connection immediately. The more they work on this style of attachments, the more naturally they will start to see solutions.

Here is what I came up with:

This is the code I wrote to solve the challenge. The trickiest part is getting the robot to the exact right location (lined up with the blue tape) angled exactly facing the tower. This probably took me like 20 slight adjustments to get it just right. Remember that your robot will need to move for different numbers of rotations since our squares are not in the exact same locations.

Here is where my robot landed after I fine-tuned the code to get it to the target square. Honestly, I would have liked it to be a little more centered, but this worked and perfection was not the goal.

This is what it looked like after it knocked over the tower:

And here is my code! It would have been a good idea to have the gear rotate back to it’s starting position so it would be ready for the next run, but I just lifted the attachment by hand, rotated it to where I wanted it, and then set it back into place each time.

Good luck with this challenge!

Related Links

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All Learning Activities

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This is my first challenge that will involve using an actual sensor. In that way, this is the first ACTUAL robot tutorial of this entire website. (If you haven’t already, feel free to check out all the mini-bot tutorials I made several years ago when my kids were little! Those involved learning about electronic components, but since they were not responding to their environment, they were *technically* not real robots!)

I was excited for my kids to try out the distance sensor, in particular, because I think it might be useful for the FIRST LEGO League Challenge competition that I’m hoping to coach this year. Basically, the goal is that rather than telling exactly how far forward the car should go, the child should place an object in front of the car’s path and then get it to stop when it is a certain distance from that object. A more difficult challenge would be to not tell the car how far to turn either, but even I’m not sure how to do that yet! Instead, I still allowed my kids to tell the car how many rotations to turn.

This challenge is also a little more difficult than previous challenges because the kids have to somehow find a way to attach the distance sensor to the robot itself. This attachment will be slightly more challenging than the first attachment required in the Pushing an Obejct Challenge. Kids are likely to find that they prefer one task over the other. Some kids will prefer the building. Others will prefer the coding. Personally, I prefer the coding, but my 9 year old LOVES to build. Neither is better than the other and both preferences play a valuable role on a robotics team.

For your reference, here are the challenges that I’ve done so far and the ones that I’m planning to write soon. Sign up for my newsletter to stay up-to-date!

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation (*this post*)
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square

Spike Prime Challenge: Using the Distance Sensor for Navigation Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 20 minutes, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Easy to Medium
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

This challenge involves two parts. The first part is to somehow take the distance sensor and attach it to the hub using the pieces in the yellow bin that came with the robot. (If you have other pieces, feel free to use those as well!) You can think of the sensor like eyes. You have to put the eyes on the front of the car so that it can “see” where it’s going.

The second part of the challenge is to use the “eyes” to tell the car when to stop rather than telling the car how many rotations to move forward. No longer can they say “move forward for 3 rotations.” That block is no longer allowed is no longer allowed in this challenge. Instead the car will approach “walls” and you will tell it to stop when it is a certain distance from a wall. Note that I used the yellow bin and the two yellow surfaces for my walls, but kids can use different household items and position them where ever they want.

The goal is to make it from the starting square to the target square without telling the robot to move forward for a specified distance or number of rotations.

My Solution

The first step is to attach the distance sensor to your bot. There are several different ways that you could go about solving this challenge. To give you an example, I’m going to first show you the different ways my 13-year-old, my 9-year-old, and I built our attachments. Here is my 9 year old’s design:

The biggest issue with this design is that the “eyes” can rotate up and down. This could be considered a feature as you have the option of pointing the eyes upward or in any direction you want. However, if we were professionally designing a robot, we would definitely want to lock the sensor in place. It would be terrible if this were a Mars rover and driving over bump terrain caused the sensor to rotate straight down into the bot itself. However, for this particular challenge, my 9-year-old’s design worked perfectly.

Next, here is my design. My primary goal was to have a simple design that locked the sensor in place.

This design does the job, with 4 pins and one square piece that allows us to connect two surfaces in different planes.

Finally, I will show you my 13-year-old’s design. It made me laughs when I saw it.

He simply used two pins to connect the sensor directly to the motor, which hadn’t even occured to me. It is off center, but still capable of “seeing” walls as it approaches them. All-in-all, his functions well, has the sensor locks in place and uses two fifths the number of pieces as my design. Well-played, sir.

Once you have your sensor design, the next step is to set up walls so that the bot will have an indicator of where to stop. My goal was to have my robot drive straight until it needed to make roughly a right angle turn to get to the blue square, then drive straight until it was close to my second wall. This is how I set up my walls:

And here is the program I wrote that would accomplish this task:

Good luck doing your first challenge with a sensor! Feel free to reach out with questions!

Related Links

Robotics Activities for Kids
Science Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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If your child has already completed the first two challenges, this one should be a piece of cake. It requires the same skills as before. Namely, the ability to drive the car from a starting location to a target destination. They could even use the same progam they wrote for the first challenge, Moving to a Square. However, this time they will likely want to build an attachment to push the object with, so I wanted to keep it simple.

Some kids that play with LEGOs all the time will likely find this challenge trivial. Others will probably wonder, “how in the heck am I supposed to attach ANYTHING to this?” I have kids that fall on both ends of the spectrum. However, I have noticed that even those that missed the boat on playing with LEGOs as a kid catch on pretty quickly. They might need to model others for awhile, but eventually it will all start coming more naturally.

For your convenience, here are all the challenges I have written so far or have plans to write in the near future. Sign up for my newsletter to say up-to-date!

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object (*this post*)
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square

Spike Prime Challenge: Moving to Square Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 5 minutes, since one child in particular is really good at buildign with LEGOs, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

This challenge is very similar to the first challenge, Moving to a Square. If you need to set up a starting squae and a target square using masking tape, please refer back to that post for detailed instructions. Rather than simply driving the robot from one square to the other, this time, there is an object (such as the masking tape) in the target destination. The objective this time is to move that object completely out of the square.

If your child is completely stuck, you could ask if they would rather push or pull the object out of the square. Pushing is definitely easier. Then ask them how they want to push. What surface are they going to use to push the tape out of the way? Could they somehow add a flat surface to the front of their robot like a plow that could be used for pushing?

My Solution

I will say this each time, but my solution is not the only correct solution! The students may find that they don’t need any sort of attachement. Maybe they can just drive their robot past the square and find that in the process the tape is moved out of the square! As long as they are solving the challenge the way you presented it, whatever they do is a complete success!

For my solution, I first created an attachment to add a “plow” feature to the front of my robot. Here’s what it looked like:

So that you can see how it was made here are some expanded views with it taken off the robot and broken into it’s component pieces

Once my plow piece was attached, I simply modified my program from the first challenge to have it drive past the square. Here is my word blocks code:

Good luck! Let me know if you have any questions!

Related Links

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Science Activities for Kids
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As long as you didn’t make your target destination directly in the line of sight of your robot’s starting position, you will have had some practice turning already. However, at least when my kids did the first challenge, they were taking random stabs in the dark regarding how many rotations to turn the wheels to get it to point in the right direction. This second challenge will give them another opportunity to think about how the robot responds to turn commands.

Also, if, like my kids, your children solved the first challenge by adjusting individual motors using this Motors blocks, this week also gives them an opportunity to play around with the built in driving functions within the Movement blocks.

For your reference, here are all the Challenge posts I’ve either written or am planning to write soon! Hopefully I will come back and update as I go. Sign up for my newsletter to be notified when new content is available!

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle (*this post*)
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square

Spike Prime Challenge: Avoiding an Obstacle Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 20 minutes, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Easy to Medium
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

If you still have the squares set up from the first challenge, Moving to a Square, you can use the exact same starting point and target destinations. If not, then simply make a square the same size as your robot to launch your robot from. (It is important that the square is small enough that you will set your robot down in the same spot oriented the same way each time.)

Then make a square that is bigger that your robot is aiming to land in. As I mentioned last time, make a smaller square to make the challenge more difficult and a bigger one to reduce frustration. I only require that my kids barely touch the square to succeed.

Now, whichever way your kids drove for the first challenge, you will want to place an obstacle in the way so that their first program will no longer work. My kids drove straight and then turned the first time, so I put the obstacle in front of their car’s starting position. You can use whatever you want for the obstacle, but the big yellow bin that the spike prime comes in makes a great option! Once kids are able to complete this challenge, they should be able to navigate any sort of maze.

Now, here is an important point that I’ve learned from working with my own children. File management does not come easily to kids. As a programmer, keeping all of my programs organized and named in a way that I can understand later is a crucial part of my job. Kids, on the other hand, are happy to keep working in the same file indefinitely and leave it named “Untitled 1.” This is something that they have to be trained out of.

I would let them know when they start doing this challenge that they have two options. The first is to select New Project from the Home Menu.

If they go this route, then make sure they:

• name their file something that make sense.
• select Word Blocks.

I had my kids repeat “word blocks” so many times that I don’t think they will ever forget that step. I can tell my youngest feels particularly empowered with this piece of confident knowledge. Of course, if you would rather them code with Icon Blocks or Python, then choose that instead. I feel like Word Block are the perfect place to start.

The second option, which might be a good idea if the kids were happy with their solution to the first challenge, is to start with a duplicate of that program. To start, click on My Projects. The click the upper-right corner of the program you want to duplicate and select duplicate.

A new copy of that program will appear with “1” added to the end of the file name. Click the upper right corner of the box and rename your file.

Now you can just click on this file to open it and start modifying it meet the new challenge!

My Solution

There is, of course, more than one way to solve this particular challenge. You could take the scenic route around the yellow bin or try to get to the target square as quickly as possible. To start, you will want to place your bin in such a way that it blocks your path from the first challenge and also does not allow you to just turn and draw a straight line between the starting square and target square.

This is where I put my yellow bin:

Next, I just changed the sequences of turns and moving forward commands from the first program in order to navigate around the bin. This is what I came up with:

In the last program, drove straight and then turned. This time, I turned first to avoid the obstacle, drove straight, and then turned again to direct myself back towards the final destination.

Good luck!

Related Links

Robotics Activities for Kids
Science Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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Now that kids have a basic familiarity with how to build a robot and write programs to operate it, the next step is to push the limits of what the robot is capable of doing. Step 1: Moving! This robot that we’ve built can clearly move, but at the moment, we don’t know how. If you’ve followed the tutorials up to this point, particularly the one on writing your first program, your child will realize that there are a LOT of coding word blocks that we haven’t explored.

Now, I could just TELL you how to make your robot move. In fact, I will actually do this at the bottom of this post. However, this is not where I recommend starting. It’s so much more fun for kids to uncover a solution on their own than to mindlessly follow a tutorial. In the long run, I think they actually remember what they learn much better using this technique as well. (Now that I’m getting my Masters in Education and earning my teaching credential, I realize this educational philosophy is actually known as the constructivist theory, and I’m all for it.)

The other day, I had my 7, 9 and 11 year olds all work together to try to get the robot to complete this simple moving challenge. I helped them turn on the robot, connect it to the computer and start a new program. Then I said, “See if you can figure it out. How are you going to make this robot move?” They quickly found the code blocks to turn the motor so they tried that. However, it took them a little longer to figure out how to turn two motors at the same time and not sequentially, so their little bot was spinning all over the place. They eventually figured it out, but it was tricky!

After they got to experience the satisfaction of success and I congratulated them on their hard work, I showed them that there was actually another simpler way to make the motor move! The Spike Prime App actually has built into it functions for driving a robot assuming two wheels are connected to either side of the hub. Because this activity was presented as an exploration rather than something to be graded on, they were excited to learn this new information. After all the work they put into controlling the motors separately, I’m sure they appreciated this dual motor functionality so much more!

Below you will find the “challenge” as I presented it to my kids, some tips you can offer them if they are getting stuck, as well as my own solution. However, my answer is not the only correct answer! While there’s nothing wrong with looking at my solution to learn from it and get ideas, if someone solves the challenge a completely different way (like my own kids did) that is amazing! We can all learn from each other and iterate to improve upon or designs. Isn’t the human mind great?

It’s going to take me awhile to get all of these posts written, but here are the upcoming challenges that you can expect. Sign up for my newsletter if you’d like to stay up to date! Hopefully, I will remember to come back and add the links as I go:

• Spike Prime Challenge 1: Moving to a Square (*this post*)
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 2: Avoiding an Obstacle
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 3: Pushing an Object
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 4: Using a Distance Center for Navigation
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 5: Knocking Over a Tower
  
• Spike Prime Challenge 6: Lifting a Square

Spike Prime Challenge: Moving to Square Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: This took my kids about 20 minutes, but it could be more or less!
Difficulty: Easy to Medium
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check to compare!

The Challenge

The premise behind this challenge is very simple. The robot car starts in one square that is the same size as the car. The objective is to move to another square a few feet away that is slightly bigger. The initial orientation of the robot car should not be pointed at the target square. (Or, to start with an easier challenge, point the car at the target! Why not?)

It is important when you are setting up this challenge that the square the robot starts in is the same size as the car itself.

The reason why this matters is that you want your robots movement to be repeatable. If we made the starting location be a big square then you might not set your robot in the exact same place every time. We want the robot to fit snugly inside its homebase so that we can minimize variability in the robots movements.

The reason why we want the target destination to be bigger is just to minimize frustration.

You have a lot of flexibility in how define your success criteria. Maybe you want to make the destination square really big. You could specify that the entire robot has to be inside the square to make it more challenging. Personally, I just said that any part of the robot had to touch the square to make it easier. To make it really easy, you could also just make a big line and say the child has to cross the line in order to succeed.

Since the point is just to learn how to make the robot move, I opted to make it as easy as possible to succeed. Once they understand the basic concepts of motion, at that point, it is just a matter of iterating to fine tune their solution.

My Solution

Again, my solution technique is not the only right way to go about this! Also, because our squares will not be in the same spots, you will need to adjust the exact number of rotations to have it work for your bot.

As I mentioned above, it is possible to solve this challenge using only the “Motors” coding blocks. That’s the way my kids did it. However, it is a little tricky since you can only operate the motors sequentially. A way around this is to add another “When program starts” block, however, this can get confusing really quickly. I highly recommend you allowing kids to follow this rabbit trail if they get started on it to see how far they can go.

LEGO built a whole set of command blocks called “Movement” that allow you to move forward, backward, left, and right. However, in order for these commands to work, you have to tell the program which two ports are connected to your two wheels! Here is my program so you can see what I mean.

To figure out how many rotations to do, I just used trial and error and it didn’t take very long. When I am coaching my FLL tournament team, I will definitely be encouraging them to try out the “Set Motor Rotation to ___ cm” block!

Good luck coming up with your own solution!

Related Links

Robotics Activities for Kids
Science Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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Here is the entire LEGO Spike Prime Tutorial Sequence. I am hoping I will remember to come back and update this as we go!

• Tutorial 1: The Unboxing
• Tutorial 2: Testing the Motors and Sensors
• Tutorial 3: Installing the App and Connecting the Hub
• Tutorial 4: Writing and Managing Programs
• Tutorial 5: Building the First Robot Car

As I’ve mentioned previously, I am creating this series in real time as our family learns how to work with the Spike Prime robots. Many eons ago, I bought a LEGO Mindstorm kit and never really got into using it, because the learnind process felt like more than I can handle at the time I’m hoping by breaking the process up into manageable steps, more people will take advantage of this incredible opportunity to learn robotics and programming in a fun, hands-on way.

My goal is to start my own FIRST LEGO League Challenge team in my local community for 4th through 8th graders. My goal is to understand how to work with these robots before we start meeting with other kids in September. So far, things are going smoothly. I already have my oldest working on simple challenges before our competition material arrives! I’m hoping to share posts on what we’re doing soon so that even those who will not be doing a LEGO robot tournament can still experience some of the same excitement and satisfaction of getting a robot to do your bidding.

To build our first robot car, we are going to use one of LEGO’s supplied tutorials. However, I will walk you through this process and point out any areas that might be a little confusing for those who are not fluent in working with LEGO. For the actual competition, we may end up using a different base car so that it is easier to add and remove attachments, but this base car will be a great place to start!

Building First Robot Car Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: About 20 – 30 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check!

Instructions

1. To find a tutorial for building a base robot car using the supplied material in the LEGO Education Spike Prime set, open the Spike app.
   
2. Once you are to the home page, click on the Build menu on the left hand side of the screen.
   
3. Now, you do NOT want to try building the Advanced Driving Base Assembly. There really isn’t any guidance when you get to this page. We decided to try starting with this first tutorial only to find we didn’t have all the necessary pieces. Instead, I recommend starting with the Driving Base 1. How is Driving Base 1 different from Driving Base 2 and 3? I don’t know yet. What I do know is that adding on pieces to Driving Base 1 has been enough for my oldest to complete several challenges that I have given him using only pieces included in the LEGO Education Spike Prime set.
   
4. Before you start building, I recommend getting your workspace set up. It will be handy to have your LEGO trays in front of you with the contents posters nearby and also a space for the laptop so you can read the instructions.
   
5. Once you’ve selected Driving Base 1, you will be presented with step-by-step building instruction in the traditional wordless, picture-based LEGO format. If you are not already comfortable with this style of instructions, I promise you will get better with practice. In the meantime, I’m going to list out some steps that migth be confusing. For example, the step blow is really just telling you to put the battery in the Hub. If you’ve followed my tutorials up to this point, your battery is already in the Hub, so you can just ignore this step.
   
6. Step 3 is telling you to rotate the blue circle on the motors until the dots line up. You can do this just by twisting them with your hand.
   
   This is about what it should look like when you’re done. Make sure you do this on both sides.
   
7. On step 4, you need two straight yellow pieces to act as axles. Next to the picture in the needed materials box is the number 3 inside of a circle. This is telling you how long the pieces you select should be.
   
   You can match up the axles with the supply list to find precisely the right lengths.
   
8. Step 14 is telling you to attach the Hub to the motors on the base you’ve built.
   
   When you are done, it should look like this:
   
9. Step 32 is telling you slide the large motor underneath the Hub and shows you which posts and holes to use to attach it to the car.
   
   Make sure you weave the cable through too.
   
10. In the end you should have a completed car with 2 motors that can be used to drive the car and one motor that can ge used to attach to a gear. This third gear motor can do a whole lot as you will soon see.
    

Stay tuned for some basic challenges to get your kids using robotics and coding to problem-solve. I’m planning to share both the challenges themselves plus an example of how you might both build attachments and program the codes to solve them!

Related Links

Science Activities for Kids
Robotics Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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The reason why I myself am learning how to use a Spike Prime is because I would like to try coaching a FIRST LEGO League Challenge team for 4th to 8th graders. Literally anyone can do this regardless of your educational or professional background. This program seems like it will be such a fun and valuable experience for the kids. I am hoping to have a team of 8 to 10 kids (including my 3 kids that are currenty in that age range).

However, whether or not you want to officially compete at a FIRST LEGO League tournament, one of these kits is a great way for kids to have fun learning robotics, engineering, and especially programming. I worked as a computer programmer for the Air Force for over a decade and didn’t start learning computer science until I was 18 and in college. An experience like this would have given me such an incredible headstart.

If kids are already familiar with MIT’s free programming language, Scratch, they will find the transition to programming LEGO robots seamless. My kids all learned Scratch using Code Your Own Games! by Max Wainewright. I highly recommend this book for those just getting started with Scratch. Here is my full review.

When I started making this Spike Prime series, after I installed the app and learned how to connect to Bluetooth and transfer files, I was actually planning to move next to building a robot that we could program. However, I quickly realized that learning how to manage files was going to be an important step that didn’t come naturally for my kids. They tend to not remember to even name their programs. However, as a computer scientist, I can attest to the importance of implementing some sort of naming and organization strategy. I’m hoping this post will help with that!

For your convenicene, here is the entire LEGO Spike Prime Tutorial Sequence. I am hoping I will remember to come back and update this as we go!

• Tutorial 1: The Unboxing
• Tutorial 2: Testing the Motors and Sensors
• Tutorial 3: Installing the App and Connecting the Hub
• Tutorial 4: Writing and Managing Programs
• Tutorial 5: Building the First Robot Car

Writing and Managing Spike Prime Programs

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: About 20 – 30 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check!

Instructions

1. The first step anytime you would like to write a program is to launch the Spike app. I am a Windows user, so I’m not sure how these instructions will differ on a Mac, but I have a shortcut to the app on my desktop. I could also search “Spike” from my list of applications.
   
2. Once you launch the app, you should see the screen below. Select Spike Prime. You will also have to confirm that you have everything you need (namely, the Spike Prime set).
   
3. To write a new program, click the “New Project” button in the middle of the screen. Notice that to the right of this button, it is showing all of the recently created projects. We will clean these up in a bit.
4. Next it will ask you what type of program you would like to create. I LOVE that they have multiple options. The icon blocks are supposed to be good for kids who don’t even know how to read. Since my 4th through 8th graders can read, I am planning to start them off on Word Blocks. They will feel right at home if they have any familiarity with Scratch. I am so happy that it has a Python option as well. My 8th grader has started to learn Python and it is a language that I used regularly in my job as a computer scientist.
   
   To start, click “Word Blocks.” You can always try the simpler icon version or more advanced Python version later. Note that in faded letters you can see that the program will be named Project 1. You could name the project something more applicable here, but I am going to skip it so that I can show you how to rename the file later if you forget. (Which, I promise, my own kids will.)
   
5. In order to be able to test our program, we will need to have the Hub connected. You can always do this using a cable, but the cable isn’t necessary as long as your computer has Bluetooth.
   
   Before you connect the Hub, press the power button on the Hub and then the Bluetooth button in the upper right. Also, be sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your computer or tablet.
   
   Then, click the yellow button with the Hub icon inside to open the Hub connection.
   
6. The app will then ask you what color your Hub’s power light is. We just updated our Hub recently, so our Hub is green, but if at any point it needed an update, we would select the white button to receive the update.
   
7. Assuming you have already enabled Bluetooth on your device, turned on your Hub, and pressed the Bluetooth button, it should find your Hub and show it listed on the right side of your screen. Ours is named Stuart. Press the Connect button.
   
   It should tell you your Hub was successfully connected.
   
8. If you did NOT name your program in Step 4, this would be a good time to make sure your program’s name is something that will remind you of the purpose of the program. To rename the program, click the 3 vertical dots in the upper left of the screen next to the project name, then select “Rename Project.” For us, the default name was Project 1.
   
9. I will call this program “Hello World” since my goal is to create a program that will display the message “Hello World” on the Hub. This is cusomarily the “first program” in every computer science class I’ve ever taken where we are learning a new language.
   
   After you have typed in your program’s name, click “Save.”
   
10. Next, I will click on the Light menu on the left hand side of the screen.
    
11. Since I want to write a message, I will drag the “Write” block over into my program space and connect it to the block labled, “when program starts.” Then I will change the message inside to whatever I want it to say. In my case, this is “Hello World.”
    
12. Our first program is complete! Now we just need to transfer it onto our Hub so that we can run it. A simple way to do this would just be to push the yellow triangular “play” button on the bottom right of the screen. This will transfer it over to the Hub into the slot number selected and run the code.
    
    However, suppose we already had a program we wanted to keep in slot 0. We can change the program number by pushing the arrow to the right of the number.
    
13. From here, we can push the arrows next to the icon of the hub to select the slot number we want. I decided to go with 7.
    
14. Now when we select the yellow button, it will send the program to slot 7 and run the program. Using this yellow triangle button is probably what we want to do most of the time. However, if for some reason you didn’t want to run the program at this time, just transfer the program to run later, you can click the download button in the bottom right of the Download to Hub screen.
    
15. At this point, you have the option of running the program either by hitting the yellow button or by pressing the left and right arrows on the Hub itself to select program 7, then hitting the center button to run it. When you run the program, you should see the message “Hello World” scrolling across the screen. I would recommend playing around with both methods. Particularly if you plan to compete, the kids will have to run the programs directly from the Hub and not from the computer during a competition.
    
16. One nice thing about the Spike Prime app is that your files will save automatically. When you are done, you can just close the window. However, I want to show you how to manage your files from within the app. Suppose you wanted to find this program months later. Assuming you are still within the file, click the house icon in the upper left to go back to the Home page.
    
17. From the Home page, click My Projects in the left hand menu.
    
18. From here, you will see all your programs listed. I am going to go ahead and delete all the ones I don’t want. I hadn’t realized that each time I worked on one of the tutorials, it was creating a file. Since I can go back and redo these tutorials at any time, I am going to select them all and delete them.
    
19. Now your projects list should look nice and clean! I recommend doing some housecleaning reguarly to name your files and remove programs you don’t want.
    

Tips & Tricks

The tutorial above describes how to write and manage programs using the Spike Prime software. However, I want to also mention the shortcomings that I see with the software at present and workarounds. Some of these work arounds are based on advice from the LEGO Education help desk.

• First, there does not seem to be a way to have folders within this My Projects page. Since I have many kids and plan to have even more students writing programs for my robots once I start my team, it would be great to organize the programs by the author. To work around this lack of folder structures, I am planning to just have my kids start each program with their initials so we know whose is whose.
  
• Second, it seems that there used to be a way to see a list of what programs were on the Hub from within the software. However, LEGO customer support told me that they lost this functionality with a firmware update and are working on a way to add it back. In the meantime, they suggested having the program write the name of the project like we did above for “Hello World” at the start of each program. This is mildly annoying, but also a good idea while we wait for the update.
  
• Third, I asked if there was a way to delete programs from slots so that we would know which slots did not have programs in them. This would be helpful so that someone doesn’t accidently write over someone else’s program that they wanted to keep on the Hub. (Theoretically, overwriting programs is not a big concern, since all the programs are automatically saved within the app. If we’re doing a good job, the naming system should make the one we want easy to find and transfer to the hub again if needed.) Here is LEGO’s advice:
  
  
  Again, not a bad idea, but also mildly annoying. I hope they update the firmware soon! Also, despite the grammar issues, I have found the LEGO customer support team to be extremely helpful and responsive, which is always encouraging.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! I hope this tutorial was helpful.

Related Links

Science Activities for Kids
Robotics Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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Even if you are not planning to join an official LEGO League team, the Spike Prime can be such a fun way to get kids learning how to build and program robots. I have been offering my 13 year old a series of simple challenges the past couple of days and he’s been enjoying it so much that he’s asking to do more. Kids feel a sense of accomplishment when they can make their robot do what they want with the push of a button.

The first step down this programming path whoever is to install the software! Below ou will find a step-by-step breakdown of what this process looks like as of Summer 2023. The next step is to transfer your program to your robot. This can be done simply using the cable that comes with the robot. However, since it has the technology built-in, we wanted to be able to connect the robot to the computer using Bluetooth as well!

Connecting to Bluetooth wasn’t as seamless a process as I would have hoped. It took us two tries to make it work. If you’re having trouble as well, read the steps below! (Basically, you need to have your Bluetooth turned on BEFORE you try to connect your robot. If you forget, just start over and try again.) Once we had the order of steps figured out, it was smooth sailing! The next few tutorials will describe how to write your first program from scratch and building your first robot following LEGO’s tutorial.

For your convenicene, here is the entire LEGO Spike Prime Tutorial Sequence. I am hoping I will remember to come back and update this as we go!

• Tutorial 1: The Unboxing
• Tutorial 2: Testing the Motors and Sensors
• Tutorial 3: Installing the App and Connecting the Hub
• Tutorial 4: Writing and Managing Programs
• Tutorial 5: Building the First Robot Car

Installing App and Connecting Hub Details

Recommended Age Range: Elementary, Middle School, High School
Time Required: About 20 – 30 minutes (depending on whether you follow the LEGO getting started tutorials)
Difficulty: Easy
Cost: The LEGO Education Spike Prime Set costs $400 on the LEGO site. As of this writing, it is more expensive on Amazon, but I would check!

Instructions

1. To start, go to http://www.legoeducation.com/start. Choose the Spike App.
   
2. This will take you to a page to download the app. Make sure you choose the correct option for your computer and operating system. (This will likely be selected by default.)
   
3. Use the installation wizard to install the hub.
   |
   
   
4. When you click “Finish” to close the setup wizard, the app should open automatically. All future times you want to run the app, you will use the shortcut which was automatically installed to your desktop (or find the app in your program files).
   
5. My hub was charging via the cable the first time I opened the app, so the computer was able to detect the hub and realize that it needed an update. I went ahead and updated my hub by choosing “UPDATE HUB OS.” I recommend that you make sure you update your hub righ away as well as the message says it will delete any programs already installed on your hub. Best to do this before you start transfering programs!
   
6. Once the app is open, select Spike Prime.
   
7. The very first time you run the app, you’ll have to confirm that you have everything you need.
   
8. You did it! The app is finally open. If you’re like me, you’ll go ahead and click the buttons along the side, just to see what’s in there: Home, Start, Units, Build, My Projects. Over the next several tutorials, I’m sure I will cover all of these pages, but for now, the best place to start is with the Start button. You can either select this from the side menu or inside the section labeled “Get started with Spike Prime.”
   
9. This is what the start menu looks like. It is filled with multiple, easy to follow tutorials that help you get started writing programs to control the Spike Prime hub, motors, and sensors. These tutorials simplify the process by removing all unnecessary features.
   
10. These programs are so easy to follow that I’m not going to go through each one, though I recommend that you do them all! It shouldn’t take very long as each one is only 2 to 3 lines of code. However, I will go through the first one as it helps to make sure you can connect to Bluetooth.
    
    You always have the option of just connecting your hub to the computer with the included USB cable, so technically, you don’t need to use Bluetooth. However, we definitely want to be able to connect to Bluetooth for convenience. This is where I ran into a little trouble the first time I tried this. My recommendation: before you start the Light Matrix tutorial, first make sure the Bluetooth on your computer is turned on. I have a PC, but I imagine on any computer this can be done from the Settings. Just search for “Bluetooth.”
    
11. Next, before you click into the Light Matrix tutorial, it won’t hurt anything to turn the hub on and press the Bluetooth button in the upper right corner so that it is already looking for your computer. Moving forward, when I start creating programs from scratch, I will always do these two steps before I try to connect the hub as it seems to work seamlessly done in this order. However, this first time, I did not. I pressed the button to connect to the hub with it turned off.
    
12. The first step was that it asked me the color of the power button. This tells you whether or not the hub needs to be updated. However, in order to know the color of your power button, the hub needs to be on. If you haven’t already, turn it on. Since I already updated the hub when it was connected via the USB cable, mine was green, so I seleced green.
    
13. Next, if you haven’t already, press the Bluetooth button in the upper right corner of the hub. Provided your computer’s Bluetooth is turned on, it should find the hub and give you the option to connect with a button on the right. If for some reason it doesn’t, close the app, restart it and try again, but this time, turn on the Hub and press the Bluetooth button before you start the tutorial.
    
14. The first time you connect your Hub, you will have the option to rename it. We named our’s Stuart.
    
15. Now you are free to follow the steps in the Light Matrix tutorial to make your hub make a smiley face. I feel the instructions in these tutorials are very well done, so I don’t think you will have any trouble. You start by clicking and dragging the appropriate “word blocks” onto the area of the screen where your program will live.
    
    Once the code is written, you press the play button in the lower right to make the code display the smiley face. Note that by pressing this button, you are actually downloading the code to slot 0 on your hub, since the number zero is selected to the left of the stop button. You could change this number and put the program in a different slot. I will talk about this more in the next tutorial where we created our own program from scratch!
    
16. At this point, your Hub should be displaying a smiley face! The rest of the steps walk you through changing the light pattern on the hub to make it look like a winking smiley face. Now that you have the app running and are connected to Bluetooth, I recommend you complete all 6 tutorials in the start section.

I hope you are enjoying getting to know your Spike Prime Hub as much as we are! Feel free to reach out if you run into any trouble. My next couple tutorials will be on creating your first program by starting a new project from scratch and learning how to manage your projects. After that we will build our first robot car using LEGO’s instructions. One we have a car and know how to program, I plan to create simple challenges that I will give to my kids so they can work on their building and programming skills. Feel free to follow along!

Related Links

Science Activities for Kids
Robotics Activities for Kids
All Learning Activities

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