I had an interesting experience today in our fourth grade open ended engineering challenge.\u00a0 The students have to build and market a burglar alarm using the Lego WeDo Robotics Kit and Resource Kit (extra parts).\u00a0 One team had the tilt sensor attached to a burglar on the burglar’s airplane.\u00a0 So what is wrong with this?\u00a0 You might think that it is just too unusual. But, the way I think about it and the way I explained it to the student, was that it did not meet the requirements of the burglar alarm.\u00a0 By the way, this is a very common problem in engineering in my experience!<\/p>\n
So I explained it like this.\u00a0 The burglar alarm has to be very general; it must stop any burglar from entering the house.\u00a0 Also, how could you get the sensor on the burglar’s plane in advance? \u00a0 The student was actually arguing that you could but I think he just did not want to give up on his cool plane and cool idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"