Engineering Pathway Students Make Music With Robot
Students in Principles of Engineering wrapped up their Applications of Robotics unit with a fun and creative challenge: to design a robot that can play a song on an instrument.
Principals of Engineering is offered as part of Barstow’s Pathways Program and Project Lead the Way, a nationally recognized course progression for students interested in STEAM. Principles of Engineering offers hands-on and project-based learning, and meets both in the classroom and at IDEA Space.
For this musical assignment, students were allowed to choose the song and the instrument. Their instrument of choice, a piano, added some design challenges such as how to play three notes at the same time, how to manipulate several keys on the piano in a very tight space and how to code the robot so it could play the song at the correct tempo. Using experience and knowledge from previous projects throughout the semester, they worked as a team on the initial design and through the iteration process. They successfully completed the project ahead of schedule.
See and hear the finished project on Instagram.
