![]() You didn't specify that they should use a knife to spread the peanut butter, or that they needed to take a piece of bread out of the bag first! However, your volunteer might have done something silly, like used their fingers to spread peanut butter on the bread bag! But remember, your volunteer is a robot that needs very specific instructions. For example what if your program just said "spread the peanut butter on the bread"? That seems obvious enough to you. There are a lot of tiny steps you take when making a sandwich that you might do automatically, without giving them much thought, and you could have forgotten to include these in your program. You might have been very surprised to find out that at first, your volunteer failed to follow what you thought were a very simple set of instructions. Extra: Try this project with other household tasks, such as washing dishes, folding laundry or cleaning your room.Extra: You could also try doing this project with verbal commands instead of written instructions.Repeat the debugging process until your volunteer successfully makes a normal peanut butter and jelly sandwich.Do they make the same mistakes as last time? Are there any new mistakes? Based on your notes on any mistakes you observed, write a new version of your program and ask your volunteer to try again. Now you need to "debug" your program by fixing the bugs, or errors, in the code.Do they make any mistakes? If so, at what step(s) of your program? Write down the step(s) and what problem(s) occurred. Watch carefully as your volunteer follows the procedure.They also shouldn't assume any steps that are missing. They need to act like a robot and do whatever the instructions tell them to do-even if that results in making a mistake. You want them to do it by following your written directions exactly. Explain that you need them to pretend they have never made a sandwich before. Your volunteer probably already knows how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Give your written procedure and other materials to your volunteer.Make sure you include all the steps, even ones you think are obvious. Write this procedure down as a numbered list (step 1, step 2…).Break it down into a series of steps, one at a time. Think about the procedure you follow to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.Surface that can tolerate a little bit of mess.See the "More to explore" section for a link to a project on building a robotic hand. In this project you will ask a volunteer to act like a robot, so you don't have to worry about building one. Note: building a robot that can do all the things a human hand can do-such as picking up objects with wildly different shapes without breaking them-is another entire problem on its own. Making a sandwich is so simple-this should be easy, right? You might be surprised! You'll ask the person to "think like a robot" and take your instructions very literally. In this project you will write a "program" for a person to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. ![]() The robot has to be told exactly what to do. Things that might seem simple or obvious to a human, such as making a sandwich, will not be obvious at all to a robot. Computers are very literal and will follow the instructions exactly, even if you make a mistake when writing the instructions. A computer program is a set of instructions for a computer or robot to follow. In this project you will focus on the programming side of this problem. They couldn't do it! They would need to be specifically built and programmed to perform those tasks. ![]() Imagine, however, taking any of those robots and asking it to do a simple household task, such as folding your laundry or cooking dinner. You can even buy a robot vacuum cleaner that will automatically clean your floors! There are robotic arms that can rapidly assemble cars in a factory, much faster and more accurately than people can. For example we have computer programs that can beat humans at games such as chess or TV game shows including Jeopardy. Humans have gotten very good at building machines or making computer programs that can do one specific thing much better or faster than a human can. In the real world, however, robots are much more limited. They can fly, talk, run, jump and do many other things. Movies and TV are full of robots that can look, feel and act like humans. ![]() Have you ever wanted a robot assistant that could do all your household chores? Science fiction has been showing us such robots for decades, but they're still not available! What's taking so long? In this project you will investigate some of the challenges in programming a "robot" to do a simple household task, such as making a sandwich. ![]()
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