MindRover: The Europa Project
For middle school, junior and senior high classrooms

As a scientist on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, you and your co-workers create interesting challenges for the idle research rovers. Racing around the hallways and playing ‘hot potato’ in the sick bay are two examples of the types of competitions you set up for each other.

In MindRover, students first choose a challenge. Then they build, program and compete their custom robots in an exciting 3D simulation arena. The student is designing and programming their first robot within minutes of starting. The highly acclaimed Wiring Screen in MindRover makes it easy to get started programming a robot, yet allows for very sophisticated robots from the more advanced students. Each student or team will create unique robots based on their own strategies and creativity. There is no ‘right’ way to program a robot to win a competition; there are as many unique, competitive robots as there are students in the classroom.

MindRover provides over 20 challenges to choose from, including races, sports, puzzles and battles (battles can be eliminated for school edition). Students can compete their robots against each other in classroom sponsored challenges.

MindRover vehicle chassis include wheeled, treaded and hovercraft. There are over 50 components including engines, steering systems, thrusters, navigation systems, radar, sonar, math and logic components, timing components, mode switcher and many more.

The RCX Add-on pack provides LEGO RCX component simulations that will let you build 2 LEGO robots that can be programmed and simulated in MindRover. The resulting program can be downloaded into the RCX intelligent brick to see the robot come to life in the real world. MindRover is the first program that actually lets you simulate your physical robot before programming it.

Features:

• Quick start – the tutorials can be run by the students on their own. Students are programming robots in 5 minutes and can complete the tutorials in about 30 minutes.
• Individuals or small teams can work together to design virtual robots.
• Virtual robots are quick to build and don’t fall apart when they hit the wall.
• MindRover emphasizes the ‘brains’ of the robot: Software programming techniques, engineering design skills, and simulation.
• Students quickly move from design screen to simulation to see how changes affect the behavior of their robots.
• Virtual robots can use components that are too expensive for most classrooms such as sonar, radar, lasers, GPS; as well as fun components like fireworks launcher and taxi bar lights.
• Unlimited, open-ended creativity
• MindRover can be the simulator and programming environment for physical robots (such as the LEGO RCX intelligent brick).
• Quick to clean up at the end of class!

Skills:

• Logical Reasoning
• Theory Formulation and Testing
• Debug and Analytical Thinking
• Algorithmic Reasoning
• Software Programming Fundamentals
• Algebraic Thinking
• Problem Solving, Analytical and Creative