Wake Up Your Robot

Try It — Meet the Machine

Before you turn anything on, look closely at your brick. It is a small computer, and it is about to become the brain of your robot.

Find each part below. Check the box when you have found it.

• The center button — the dark one in the middle of the button cluster, ringed by four gray arrow buttons
• The back button — the small one just above and to the left of the button cluster. It steps you backward through menus, and it is also how the brick shuts down
• The four lettered motor ports — A, B, C, D across the top edge — and the four numbered sensor ports — 1, 2, 3, 4 across the bottom edge. Motors plug in up top; sensors plug in down below
• The screen — the gray display on the face. It shows menus, your program names, and anything your programs write
• The PC port — the small USB socket on the end nearest the screen, where a cable to the computer goes. (If your brick has a rechargeable battery, its charger plugs into the battery pack itself — not this port)
• The speaker holes — the robot can make sounds too

Why is “put it away charged” a rule about being fair to the next team as much as it is about the battery?

Learn It — How You Talk to a Robot

You will not build your programs on the brick itself. You will build them in the EV3 Classroom app on your tablet or Chromebook — and then send them over to the brick.

The program travels either down a USB cable or across a short-range radio link called Bluetooth — no internet either way, just your device and your robot talking directly to each other. Many EV3 classrooms use the cable, because it never picks the wrong robot. Your teacher will tell you which way your room connects.

One robot among many

Every brick has a name, shown on the top line of its screen. Out of the box it is just “EV3,” so your teacher has probably renamed it or put it on a sticker. Here is why that matters: your classroom has a whole shelf of bricks that look exactly alike, and Bluetooth does not care about that — the app lists every brick it can hear.

Pick the wrong name from that list and your program lands on someone else’s robot. Their robot starts doing your program, your robot does nothing, and both teams spend ten minutes confused.

In your own words: why does your brick need a name that is different from every other brick in the room?

What you will see

Inside the app you will work in the coding canvas — a big open space where blocks snap together into programs, with a colorful shelf of blocks down the side. You will learn what every part of it does in this project and the next.

Do It — Get Connected

Work through these in order. Check each one off as you finish it.

Step 1 — Power on

Press the center button once. The red status light comes on, the brick clicks and hums for a moment while it starts up, and then the screen shows its menu and the light around the buttons turns green. Starting up takes about half a minute — that is normal.

• The brick is on, the light around the buttons is green, and the screen shows the menu

Step 2 — Find your brick’s name

Your teacher may have put the name on a sticker, or assigned your team a brick. Find the name and write it on your card below — you will need it every single time.

My Robot Card

Keep this card. Every project after this one starts by connecting the same way.

Step 3 — Make your project

Open the EV3 Classroom app. Choose New Project — in EV3 Classroom, every project is a word-block project. Name it First Project — and put your names in the project name too.

• My project exists, with a real name, and it is on my Robot Card

Step 4 — Connect to your robot

Cable room? Plug the USB cable into the brick’s PC port and the computer, and the app connects to that brick — the one on your table, guaranteed. Bluetooth room? On the brick, arrow over to the Settings screen (the wrench), open Bluetooth, and make sure it is checked on. Then, in the app, open the connect screen, look at the list, find your brick’s name from your card, and pick it.

• The app shows my brick connected, with a little battery meter for it

Step 5 — Look around the canvas

Find each of these before you use any of them.

Step 6 — Run a program somebody else planned

Build this exactly as shown — drag the yellow block out first, then snap the display block underneath. You did not plan this program and you do not need to understand it yet. That is Project 2.

Press Download and Run. Watch the brick — not the tablet.

• The word appeared on the brick’s screen

You pressed a button on the tablet, but the letters appeared on the robot. How did the program get from one to the other?

Step 7 — Run it on the robot — no tablet

When you pressed Download and Run, the app also saved a copy of your program on the brick itself, filed under your project’s name. The brick keeps it there even with the app closed. Prove it:

• I ran the program from the brick itself, with no tablet in my hands

Step 8 — Shut down properly

Do it in this order:

1. Press the back button until a shutdown box appears on the screen, pick the check mark, and press the center button. The screen and lights go out.
2. Check the battery. Low? Plug it in to charge.
3. Wrap the cable. Put the robot away the way you would want to find it.

• Shut down in the correct order, battery checked

Score It — Checkpoint

There is no field mission yet. Your score for this project is whether you can do the whole thing again without the sheet.

Can you do it again?

• I can power the brick on and off correctly, in the right order
• I know my brick’s name and where to find it
• I can connect the app to my brick — not someone else’s
• I can create a project with a name my team can find again
• I can run a program from the app
• I can run a program from the brick’s own file screen, with no tablet
• I know which device my project is saved on

Trouble log

Something almost certainly went wrong. That is normal and it is worth writing down — you will hit the same thing again.

Think about it

You pressed Run and the robot did something. Who decided what it would do — you, or the person who planned the blocks you copied?

Name one thing on this sheet you would tell a teammate to be careful about, and why.

Next

In Project 2 — Your First Program, you will pull that little two-block program apart and find out what every block actually does. Then you will change it and make it yours.