Design a robot to draw the lines on a football pitch
Sketching an idea and writing a microcontroller program for the line painting robot to follow
In this activity learners will make use of the theme of football on the moon to design a robot that can mark the pitch lines for a game of football on the moon. They will produce a labelled sketch of their idea and write a microcontroller program for the electronic aspects of the robot.
This is one of a series of resources that are designed to allow learners to use the theme of football on the moon to develop their knowledge and skills in Design & Technology and Engineering. This resource focusses on robotics engineering where learners design and write a program for a robot that could mark out the pitch lines for a game of football on the moon’s surface.
Activity: Design a robot to draw the lines on a football pitch
The teacher will introduce the theme of playing football on the moon and the challenges that would be faced when doing this, before explaining the robot design worksheet and task ahead to design and assemble their robot and then program it to complete the task assigned.
This activity can be simplified (particularly for less able students) by pre-downloading example programs onto the Crumble microcontroller boards or producing partially completed programs for learners to edit/ finish. Teachers could also provide sentence starters for annotations/labelling of sketches and/or provide a pre-assembled Crumble robotics kit with motors and power supply attached.
As part of the extension activities, students could write additional programs to complete the more complex lines on the pitch, such as the penalty spot and corner lines; build a prototype of the pitch marking robot and/or produce programs to mark out other sports pitches, such as rugby, hockey, netball or basketball.
This activity is designed to take between 90-140 minutes.
Tools/resources required
- Pens, pencils and coloured pencils
- Crumble controller board and USB download cable
- Three red crocodile clips and three black crocodile clips
- Three AA batteries and battery pack
- Two Crumble motors
- Crumble software and computer hardware for programming
The engineering context
Electrical, electronic and control engineers need to have knowledge, understanding and skills associated with circuit design and assembly, and the programming of electronic control systems.
Travelling and potentially living on the moon presents all sorts of challenges for engineers to overcome. For example, how will we breathe, how will we cope with much lower gravity, how will we play sports and keep fit?
Suggested learning outcomes
By the end of this free resource students will be able to understand the challenges of living and playing football on the moon; be able to produce a labelled sketch of a design for a moon based pitch marker robot and be able to write a program for the electronics of the orbit, so it can mark out the pitch.
Download the free Design a robot to draw the lines on a football pitch activity sheet below!
All activity sheets and supporting resources to design a robot are free online to download, and all the documents are fully editable, so you can tailor them to your students’ and your schools’ needs.
The activity sheet includes teacher notes, guidance, useful web links, and links (where appropriate) to the national curriculum in each of the four devolved UK nations; England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
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