Team: Byron Lahey, Natalie Freed, Camilla Jensen, Patrick Lu, Alexander Dojun Kim, Xiaolong Zhang, Loretta Cheeks
Description: ALERT (the “Active Learning Environment with Robotic Tangibles”) provides a way to program a robot by sequencing instructions represented by tiles in physical space. Each tile has a directional instruction that can be relative to the robot’s orientation or absolute: turn left, turn in this direction, spin and go in a random direction, speed up, etc. Programming the robot can be done just-in-time by showing it a tile. Or it can involve planning several steps ahead and thinking about where the instructions need to be placed so that the robot will see them. The goal of this project was to create an embodied experience for learning programming and spatial reasoning.