The next robot dance master?

What would you rather do? Learn algebra? Or teach robots how to do a hip-hop line dance?

Don’t tell the kids, but learning algebra is exactly what they’re doing when they teach robots to dance. It’s called synchronized robot dancing, and it’s the Robotics Academy’s latest foray into teaching advanced math concepts.

Basic educational robotics curricula teach students about simple robot control – how do I get my robot to move forward or turn? – to have a robot navigate a maze. The problem is that students can hard-code their maze solutions, a task that only involves relatively low-level math concepts.

The Robot Algebra project tossed out the maze and stepped out on the dance floor to teach higher-level math. Synchronized Robot Dancing joins the fun of dance contests to basic robot programming and control. Each student is a choreographer who designs their own, unique dance routine and programs it on their LEGO NXT robot.

When that’s done, their next job is getting everyone’s robots to perform the same dance routine. This isn’t as easy as it sounds because the robots have different wheel sizes and wheel bases. Downloading the same program onto each robot isn’t going to work. That’s where important algebra concepts like proportional reasoning and finding unknowns come into play. Students figure out the proportional relationships between basic robot movements such as wheel rotations. Using a programming environment that’s tailored for robot movement, they encode each robot’s dance moves and try out different strategies for synchronizing them.

Putting on a robot dance show is much more fun than navigating a maze like a rat. Even better, it gives students a meaningful way to solve problems with math and learn concepts like proportional reasoning that are the key to higher mathematics.

The Robot Algebra project is a collaboration between the Robotics Academy and the Design-Based Learning group at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center.

Getting these two robots to dance together is a lot harder than getting celebrities to dance together. 

Students describe their process.