There are over a dozen activities that you can do with your PocketLab Maker Kit! Below you will find instructions and links each activity, and you can find more ideas by browsing hundreds of PocketLab lesson plans.
First, here is a video on how to assemble the Maker Kit cart.
Make a Magnetic Minesweeper game!
Ozobot “Evo” (ozobot.com) is a tiny one-inch diameter robot that can be quickly programmed to follow lines using a Google Blockly dialect known as OzoBlockly (ozoblockly.com). This lesson combines the ability to program Ozobot to follow a circle at constant speed with Voyager’s ability to sense the resulting motion through its angular velocity sensor. The purpose of this project is to show that if speed is kept constant and the same fo
Can you devise an experiment to see whether increased CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere contributes to warming? We found a teacher who tweeted exactly what you need! @MontessoriMicky shared with us his lesson plan on a Bottle Ecosystem and had his class run an experiment using PocketLab to measure the heat absorption of a glass bottle filled with CO2 vs normal air as a control.
Ozobot “Evo” (ozobot.com) is a tiny one-inch diameter robot that can be quickly programmed using a Google Blockly dialect known as OzoBlockly (ozoblockly.com). Combining the ability to program Ozobot to rotate precisely as desired with Voyager’s ability to sense the resulting motion through its collection of sensors, the possibility of a seemingly endless variety of STEM projects becomes a reality.
In this experiment a coasting cart on a flat surface gradually slows down and stops due to rolling resistance. Two very different surfaces are compared—a carpeted floor and a wood floor. The purpose of this experiment is three-fold: (1) to determine the force of rolling resistance, (2) to determine the coefficient of rolling resistance between the cart the surface on which it rolls, and (3) to gain a practical understanding of the meaning of this coefficient. Voyager's range finder is used to collect data.
The effect of mass on the terminal velocity of an object falling in air is commonly done using basket coffee filters. But how could we study the effect of area on the terminal velocity of a falling object? One way to do this is to use PocketLab Voyager and its range finder along with a single piece of cardstock as the object to be dropped. In this lesson, students discover a relationship between area and terminal velocity and compare their results to a common model of air resistance (aka drag).
One of the most well-known physical laws related to polarization is Malus’s Law. This law states that the intensity of plane-polarized light passing through a rotatable polarizer analyzer varies as the square of the cosine of the angle through which the analyzer is rotated from the position giving maximum intensity. The lesson described here allows you to verify Malus’s Law using PocketLab Voyager and one of the light polarizers contained in the PocketLab Scientist Kit.
Virtually every student of physics has done an experiment to verify the inverse square law of light—light intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of the light. With PocketLab Voyager this is a quick and easy experiment that is also a lot of fun to perform!
Over the past twenty years, scientists have discovered hundreds of what are known as exoplanets—planets that orbit stars outside of our own solar system. Different groups of scientists worldwide have used a variety of methods to detect these planets. In this lesson we will investigate a method that has been quite fruitful in finding exoplanets as a result of the Kepler Mission, launched by NASA in 2009. Another similar mission is CoRoT, led by the French Space Agency. These missions identify exoplanets by a method called transit, in which the b