Gary Garber - Learning LEGO Mindstorms EV3

Gary Garber teaches physics, math, and engineering at Boston University Academy. Gary is the president of the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers and has led dozens of professional development workshops in education at both the local and national levels.

Gary runs the Boston University FIRST Robotics program. He has run and hosted numerous robotics workshops in VEX, Tetrix, and LEGO platforms. He has run dozens of 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 is the author of Instant LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 , Packt Publishing . He currently resides in Massachusetts, US. When he is not playing with LEGO, 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 make this book possible, including Chris Rogers, Ethan Danahy, Barbara Bratzel, and Bill Church. I would like to thank the students of Boston University Academy, in particular, the class of 2016, who remind me of how much fun students of all ages can have with LEGO. I would also like to thank Alejandro and Leonardo for reteaching me how to play with LEGO and making me watch the LEGO movie over and over again.

Barbara Bratzel is a science teacher at the Shady Hill School, a PreK-8 independent school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition, she is a consulting teacher at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University. Her most recent book, STEM by Design , a collection of classroom activities using the LEGO EV3, was published in February 2014.

Michael duPont is a maker, pilot, and theatre technician based in Central Florida. He recently graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. His specialties include microcontrollers such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, robotics, wearables, and other small electronics. You can find many of his open source projects on GitHub and on his website (http://mdupont.com/).

Jeroen Hartsuiker (born in 1971) played with LEGO Technic until his early teens. His dark ages (time when a person stops collecting and using the Danish bricks) ended while visiting LEGOLAND Billund in 1998, when he attended a workshop exploring the first generation of the MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System. Since then, he has owned and used every generation of the LEGO robot, and he wrote courseware and delivered a presentation on how to control the MINDSTORMS NXT robot using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio. He occasionally contributes a module to the Great Ball Contraption ( GBC ) at LEGO WORLD in the Netherlands. Furthermore, a MINDSTORMS robot is sometimes used to make the software-development classes he teaches even more interesting. You can visit his blog at www.dotnetjes.nl.

David Lechner works mostly as a freelance computer programmer and occasionally as a "Mad Scientist" teaching robotics as an after-school program in elementary schools. He also just completed his rookie year, coaching a FIRST LEGO League team, and has devoted much of his time to reverse engineering the EV3 as a core contributor to the ev3dev project. Prior to being self-employed, he spent 8 years doing industrial automation in the water and wastewater industry. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Oklahoma State University.

Diego "Kartones" Muoz , more commonly known by his nickname, Kartones, is a multidisciplinary developer who lives in Madrid, Spain. Having worked for more than 12 years with all kinds of desktop, mobile, and web applications, he has used quite a few languages such as C++, C#, PHP, and more recently, Ruby and JavaScript.

Regarding LEGO MINDSTORMS, he fell in love with RCX and then the NXT, both of which he liked to code in C instead of the default firmware and brick system. Now, with MINDSTORMS EV3, he seeks to code robot logic in Node.js. He's also been a technical reviewer for LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Essentials , Packt Publishing .

He loves learning about anything he comes across and keeps a few blogs. He sometimes speaks at events or user groups, and he would love to do more open source work. He can be reached at http://portfolio.kartones.net.

I'd like to acknowledge my girlfriend and my cats, for without their patience with my endless hours around computers and technology, I wouldn't be so happy.

Geoff Shannon has been an enthusiastic hardware hacker from a young age; his first job was building automated production equipment with Provel Inc. He has a bachelor's degree in computer science and recently attended a batch at Hacker School in New York City. In late 2013, he started working with LEGO robots by exploring the leJOS project and using it to run a Clojure REPL on his EV3. He currently lives in Seattle, WA, working as a software engineer.