Sphero Robot: 3D Printing the Paddle

We have started recently a 'boat building challenge' which came about as a result of a class wide design process for our students to start the new term.

We have a set of Sphero Robots in the School and we use these for a variety of coding relating tasks.   For this challenge we are looking at creating the ability for the Sphero Robot to power a boat.

The students have worked on a range of designs, with these designs the emphasis has been on the students considering shape and design and how the Sphero Robots power function (which is a spinning ball) will then allow the motion to be transferred to the boat to allow it to move.

Once again in terms of our design we have allowed our students to use Tinkercad to help with the process.  While we are wanting the students to complete the build process (or as much of it as possible) themselves we once again had students locate some of the pre-made material to help.  In this instance a key elements of the build is going to be the paddles.   These were located online.

We had a discussion in class about their format, while the shape looks like it will be suitable it was also determined that it could be broken down into a number of key elements - a series of rectangular wedges and a circle at the base of it.

The design measures 90mm from end to end and was 15mm high.   The design was imported into Tinkercad and then can be reshaped, addressed and modified.

We are now working on an axel, a way to connect the paddles and want to test it on the basis of how much power is produced as part of the process.