Hello kids!

In this lesson, we will deal with a... phobia! Have you ever heard the word “dromophobia”? Someone has dromophobia when he is afraid to cross the street.

Well, in this lesson, we will try to give Edison exactly this role!

As we have said, Edison has a line tracking sensor. With this sensor, it can detect black lines.

The barcode found in the accompanying document “Resources” with the title “Bounce in borders” activates the corresponding program. With this program, the robot moves straight, but as soon as it senses the black line on the floor, it turns away and drives somewhere else. This way, it will always stay inside the boundaries. In other words, it is restricted to the limits of the black line.

Now, let’s make Edison scan the barcode:

We place the robot on the right side, pointing to the barcode that the robot is going to scan...

We press the record button, which is round, three times.

Edison will move straight ahead and will scan the barcode.

Perfect! We have activated the “Bounce in borders” program! Let’s go now to… “capture” our robot!

First of all we need to design the track. To do this there are 3 ways:

The easiest way is to use a prepared track. We can use the oval track, printed from the accompanying document “Resources”.

We place Edison in the bordered track and we press the play button, which is a triangle.

We notice that our robot is continuously moving within the area surrounded by the line.

Another way is to use the Edison track! It is called EdMat. You can find EdMat right in the next section of this lesson.

You can download it to your computer by clicking on the green connector located at the top right of the screen and then print it.

Once again, we place Edison in the boarded track and we press the triangle play button.

Here too, we see that our robot moves within the limits of the black line:

It goes straight, but as soon as it meets the line it reverses a little bit, turns, and then continues forward.

The third way is to create our own, closed track!

How can we do that?

We take a black insulating tape, 1.5 cm wide, and stick it on a flat surface. We make our line any shape we want! However, be aware that the path must be “closed”: This means that it must end exactly where it has begun.

We place Edison inside the closed path and we notice that it cannot escape the limits.

If you want to, you can design your closed path and “trap” Edison in that!