Written by: Melissa Jellison - High School Science Teacher at Lisbon Regional School and WMSI Teacher Mentor
It’s the end of the school year and I was looking for a hands-on way to teach evolution. Then it dawned on me the number of changes or evolutions that robots go through as you figure out a way to accomplish a task—enter the Spike Prime Robotics Kits.
Students just finished a unit on genetics which was a great way to get us headed down the right path. Students started building their F1 generation robots by deciding as a group what traits would be dominant or recessive. To figure this out, students had two days to play with the kits and build robots using the tutorials. Traits such as having 4 wheels or using sensors were determined to be dominant characteristics and traits such as needing “glasses” and having three wheels as recessive characteristics. Students then used the picker wheel to determine which traits their robot would acquire.
Students then coded their robots to get food and water in their environment (food being random toys and water being blue construction paper on the floor). Students and their robots had to overcome the struggle for existence by competing in 5-minute rounds in which they had to go from their pre-determined “habitat” and move their robot to a water source and a food source. Students competed to see which robot species would be the dominant species and had survival of the fittest.
Each robot went through several evolution stages. They practiced natural selection by selecting traits they thought would be advantageous to the environment. As they tinkered with their code (microevolution) they tried different variations and then ultimately had to pick the code that would get them their resources fastest. This determined who the robots “mated” with. The second generation of robots was determined by mate choice and natural selection.
Just as students and robots were feeling comfortable, the picker wheel came on out again. Robots had to evolve to a variety of different scenarios. Some robots had to migrate, some lost their nearest food source due to genetic drift, some gained mutations that made them lose a wheel, and a cataclysmic earthquake occurred that created a rift between a robot’s habitat and their only water source. An unplanned “fortunate” mistake was when a student’s computer battery died. The student wanted to start the competition over but another student pointed out that sometimes species just aren’t “strong enough.”
In the end, some robots survived and others went extinct which is what happens in real life. By building the robots students got to apply their knowledge and apply it differently and saw the concepts come to life. Students were using the vocabulary correctly and they were having deep discussions about what traits or behaviors would be the most beneficial. This was the first time I’ve used Spike Prime to teach Evolution, and I can guarantee that it won’t be the last.