Happy Kids Becomes a real routine
Same logic, except the robot is on the floor and the carpet makes it drift. Debugging gets physical.
// Robot Arcade
Four games. The same ideas we teach.
Free, no sign-up, no download. Program a robot to run an autonomous route, pick a gear ratio that can actually climb the ramp, read binary against a sixty second clock, and wire logic gates until the output matches.
Parents: Logic Gates is harder than it looks. Binary Blitz has a two player mode for exactly this reason.
Auton · autonomous routine
Commands
Program
The robot does nothing until you run the program. That is the whole idea of an autonomous routine: no driver, no controller, just a list of instructions and whatever happens next. Lime blocks are bean bags. The orange ring is where you score.
Gear Lab · mechanical advantage
The brief
A motor gives you one speed and one amount of turning force. Gears let you trade one for the other, and you never get both. Every drivetrain decision in robotics is somewhere on that trade.
Binary Blitz · base two, against the clock
Ready when you are00
Each switch is worth the number printed under it. Turn on the switches that add up to the target. 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1. That is all binary is.
Logic Gates · boolean circuits
The puzzle
Truth table
There is no XOR gate in the list on purpose. Real chips build everything out of a handful of simple gates, and so do you here.
// Where this goes
Auton
Gear Lab
Binary
Logic
In class, these have hardware attached
Becomes a drivetrain
Students pick real gears, then find out that the fast ratio cannot climb and rebuild it.
Becomes sensor values
Once a student reads binary, sensor output and bit flags stop being magic numbers.
Becomes conditions in code
If this and not that, then stop. Same gates, written as an if statement.
// Questions
About the arcade
Are the Robot Arcade games free?
Yes. Four games, no account, no download, nothing to install. They run in the browser on a phone or a laptop and we do not collect anything about who played.
What age are the games for?
Auton and Binary Blitz work from about age 8. Gear Lab and Logic Gates suit roughly 10 and up. Adults find Logic Gates harder than their children do, which is worth knowing before you start talking.
What do the games actually teach?
Auton is sequencing and debugging, the same thinking as a real autonomous routine. Gear Lab is mechanical advantage, the trade between speed and torque. Binary Blitz is base two, which is how every computer stores a number. Logic Gates is Boolean logic, the thing processors are built out of.
Do students play these in class?
No. In class they do the real version, with hardware. These are a taste of the ideas for anybody who wants to try them from home.