LEGO Engineer and RoboLab: Teaching Engineering with LabVIEW from Kindergarten to Graduate School*

摘要

For the past 6 years, faculty members at Tufts University have developed two different software packages between LabVIEWTM and LEGOTM data acquisition systems. These packages allow us to teach engineering with both LEGO bricks and LabVIEW to students from 5 to 50 years old. The versatility of the hardware and software allow a wide variety of possibilities in what students can build and program—from robots and remote sensing devices to kinetic sculptures. As students design and build their projects, they are motivated to learn the math and science they need to optimise their project. Both college students and kindergartners respond to this motivator. In the paper, we explain how we designed software to complement these projects in allowing automation and animation. The software uses LabVIEW, extending its capabilities to kindergartners and LEGO bricks. Finally, we will show how we have used LabVIEW and LEGO data acquisition to teach elementary school science, freshman engineering, instrumentation and experimentation, and how college seniors and graduate students have used both the hardware and software to solve various data acquisition problems. THE HISTORY IN THE SUMMER of 1993, when searching for a