A Drive through the Zoo: Learning about Angles using Pro-Bot

My child's class started learning about angles about a week ago. And the teacher requested me to design an exercise for Pro-Bot that will introduce the idea of angles. As the kids are very new to the concept, I wanted to keep this one fairly simple, while still using a mix of acute, obtuse and right angles.

A trip to the zoo is almost always part of our field trips every school year. The zoo in our city happens to have buses that drive along the various points of interest/ themed animal enclosures. I felt that the turns made by the bus in this familiar setting of the zoo, might be a good way to introduce angles.

In this exercise, a scaled down version of the bus route, provides the path for Pro-Bot to drive on. As the Bot drives along the path, it is required to make angular turns at each point. I have provided the angular measurements required in degrees and distances in centimeters. The bus travels in a loop, the directions are shown using arrows. Note that the map below is not drawn to scale.

Based on the above map, write a program for Pro-Bot to drive along the following paths, assuming that the Pro-Bot is facing in the forward direction:

1. The path from the Entrance of the zoo to the African Savanah. How many turns did the Pro-Bot make? Were the angles acute, obtuse or right angles?
2. To continue from the African Savanah (where you stopped before), to the Elephants enclosure, how many degrees did the Pro-Bot turn? 
3. Program the path from the African Savanah to the Raptors. How many turns did the Pro-Bot make? Were the angles acute, obtuse or right angles?
4. Continue the path from the Raptors to the Kids' Play Area. Did you use acute, obtuse or right angles for the turns?

Alternatively, the kids can be asked to program the entire bus route as a single program, marking the types of angles used along the way.

Solutions: Procedures: Revisiting Squares

The Procedures in Pro-Bot are pre-named from Proc1 to Proc32.


1.  Let's write the program for the square and store it in a procedure called Proc1. Access the New Proc or Edit Proc options from the Menu button to access the procedures and  choose Proc1. Here's what Proc1 might look like:

// Remember that you would see Proc1 as the first line on the screen here, not Main.

   Rpt 4 [
   Fd 6
   Rt
   ]


// To run this Procedure, go back to Main by clicking on the Menu button. Call Proc1 from Main using the Proc key and the number 1 on the control pad. Then press Go and watch your Procedure execute.



2.   Here is one way to use Proc1 from the above program to draw the stack of squares.

     Rpt 3 [
     Proc 1
     Fd 6
     Rt
     Fd 6
     Lt
     ]





3.   To draw the coaches for the train using Proc1, you could use the following code:
   

    Rpt 3 [
    Proc 1
    Rt
    Fd 8
    Lt
    ]

Procedures: Revisiting squares

The following programs are intended to provide practice with writing procedures in Pro-Bot, storing them in Pro-Bot's memory and calling them.


(1)  Write a program for Pro-Bot to draw a square of sides 6 cm. Store this program as a procedure on Pro-Bot (say proc1). Now call this procedure (proc1) from Main to test and see if Pro-Bot draws a 6 cm square.



(2)  Now that you have your program for drawing a 6 cm square stored in Pro-Bot's memory, any time you want to use it, you can call it either from your Main program or from another procedure.
You may recall the figure below from the Nested Loops assignment.

Can you use the procedure that you have in Pro-Bot's memory to draw the above figure now? Rewrite your previous program for Pro-Bot to trace this figure, using the procedure for the square.




(3)   Let's revisit the Trains project from Nested Loops. Can you rewrite your previous program for Pro-Bot to draw the coaches of the train using the above procedure?

In all of the projects above, you can see that you did not have to write the code for the square anew each time. All you had to do was write the program for the square once, store it as a procedure and then call the procedure any time you needed its functionality. You were able to use the same procedure for different programs.


Here is a set of solutions.