Lesson 1: Brain Power
Every robot needs a brain (to control the robot program) and a battery (to provide power).
You will need the following items:
- VEX V5 Brain
- VEX V5 Battery
- Battery Cable (to connect the battery to the brain)
- Micro USB Cable (to connect the brain to the computer)
Be extremely careful plugging in and unplugging the Micro USB connector from the V5 Brain. The cable only fits one way and this port can be easily broken.
We will be using VEXcode V5 software to program our robots. The icon looks like this:
If the software is not already installed on your computer, you can use the online version located at https://codev5.vex.com/.
Challenge:
Let’s write our first program. In the FILE menu, select “NEW BLOCKS PROJECT“. Click on the “VEXcode Project” button and change the file’s name to “MakingShapes“.
To write a program, drag blocks from the library on the left and drop them onto the yellow “WHEN STARTED” block in the workspace. If you don’t know what a block does, you can always click on the “?” button and then click on one of the blocks to get help.
If you do this with the “DRAW RECTANGLE” block, you will see that block requires four values (x, y, w, h):
- Value 1: the top-left corner X coordinate
- Value 2: the top-left corner Y coordinate
- Value 3: the width of the rectangle
- Value 4: the height of the rectangle
It also explains how to change the color of the outside border and the inside fill color.
TASK 1:
Make a blue square and a red square next to each other.
What happens when you change the X or Y values? What happens when you change the width and height values?
TASK 2:
Make a green circle with a yellow rectangle inside of it.
TASK 3:
Make a smiley face. It should have at least the head, two eyes, and a mouth. Any other extra features are encouraged!
You can “erase” parts of a shape by drawing a black colored shape over an existing shape.
ULTIMATE CHALLENGE: “animate” the face (wink or smile) by using timing (“WAIT” blocks).
