I was glad to read about Matt Greenwolfe's use of Scribbler 2 robots as kinematics robots in the March issue of The Physics Teacher. I am very much in agreement that students can learn kinematics better by being able to discover the equations of motion and verify their accuracy using robots.
Your Mac-using readers may be interested to know that there is another way to use robots to teach kinematics that works with Mac and PC computers. I have developed a main PID algorithm that can be run on LEGO NXT robot cars which moves the cars in quantitatively accurate ways,2 and I have been using it to teach kinematics to my introductory physics and AP Physics classes since 2012. The NXTs can be sent a drag-and-drop motion graph as Dr. Greenwolfe has done, or they can be pre-programmed by the teacher with software so that the student...
