Garber - Instant LEGO Mindstorm EV3 your guide to building and programming your very own advanced robot using LEGO Mindstorm EV3

Gary Garber teaches physics, math, and engineering at Boston University Academy. Gary is the Past-President of the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, and has led dozens of professional development workshops in education, on both the local and national level. Gary runs the Boston University FIRST Robotics program. He has run and hosted numerous robotics workshops in VEX, Tetrix, and LEGO platforms. He has also run several LEGO robotics tournaments and spoken on robotics education at both local and national conferences. His robotics team has worked with Engineers Without Borders, NASA, and the National Science Teachers Association on a variety of engineering and education projects. He is currently an educational consultant, working to develop new software tools for the classroom, at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach, which is a pioneer in LEGO Robotics Education. He currently resides in Massachusetts, US and when he is not playing with LEGOS, robots, or toy trains, he enjoys spending time with his wife Catalina, and their two children, Alejandro and Leonardo.

I would like to thank the people of the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach for teaching me about LEGO robotics, and helping to make this book possible, including Chris Rogers, Ethan Danahy, Mary Theresa Nahill, Barbara Bratzle, Bill Church, and Leslie Schneider. I would also like to thank Steve Cremer and Craig Robinson for being my inspirations in the field of education.

Barbara Bratzel is a science teacher at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a consulting teacher at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University. In addition to teaching, she runs LEGO teacher workshops both in the United States and abroad. Her books include Physics by Design with NXT Mindstorms, Third Edition (2009) and LabVIEW Lessons: Classroom Activities for Learning and Using LabVIEW with LEGO Mindstorms (2011).

Chris Rogers got all three of his degrees at Stanford University, where he worked with John Eaton on his thesis looking at particle motion in a boundary layer flow. From Stanford, he went to Tufts as a faculty member, where he has remained since then, with a few exceptions. His first sabbatical was spent at Harvard, and a local kindergarten, looking at methods of teaching engineering. He spent half a year in New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship looking at the 3D reconstruction of flame fronts to estimate heat fluxes. In 2002-3, he was at Princeton, as the Kenan Professor of Distinguished Teaching, where he played with underwater robots, wind tunnels, and LEGO bricks. In 2006-7, he spent the year at ETH in Zurich, playing with very very small robots, and measuring the lift force on a fruit fly. He received the 2003 NSF Director's Distinguished Teaching Scholar Award for excellence in both teaching and research. Chris is involved in several different research areas: particle-laden flows (a continuation of his thesis), telerobotics and controls, slurry flows in chemical-mechanical planarization, the engineering of musical instruments, measuring flame shapes of couch fires, measuring fruit-fly locomotion, and elementary school engineering education. His work has been funded by numerous government organizations and corporations, including the NSF, NASA, Intel, Boeing, Cabot, Steinway, Selmer, National Instruments, Raytheon, Fulbright, and the LEGO Corporation. His work in particle-laden flows led to the opportunity to fly aboard the NASA 0g experimental aircraft. He has flown over 700 parabolas without getting sick.

Chris also has a strong commitment to teaching, and at Tufts has started a number of new directions, including learning robotics with LEGO bricks, and learning manufacturing by building musical instruments. He was awarded the Carnegie Professor of the Year in Massachusetts in 1998, and is currently the director of the Center for Engineering Education Outreach (www.ceeo.tufts.edu). His teaching work extends to elementary schools, where he talks with over 1000 teachers around the world every year, on ways of bringing engineering into the younger grades. He has worked with LEGO to develop ROBOLAB, a robotic approach to learning science and math. ROBOLAB has already gone into over 50,000 schools worldwide, and has been translated into 15 languages. He has been invited to speak on engineering education in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK, and in the US. He works in various classrooms once a week, although he has been banned from recess for making too much noise.

Most importantly, he has three kidsall brilliant, who are responsible for most of his research interests and efforts.

Chris is a professor at Tufts University, and his review in no way reflects the opinions of Tufts.

He has reviewed a number of fluid mechanics and robotics texts too.

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support files and downloads related to your book.

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at > for more details.

At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

http://PacktLib.PacktPub.com