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Extreme Environments: Building a Simple Lunar Lander

Contributed by Wade Gemmell, November 28, 2011
In this project students will build a lunar lander than must land on the moon while dealing with gravity and inertia.
  • Original Author: Wade Gemmell
  • Education Level: Elementary School, Middle School, High School, College and University
  • Content Types: Activity, Handout, Sample Scratch Project
  • Curricular Areas: Computer Science, Engineering, Science, Technology
  • Keywords: robotics, WeDo, lego, gravity, intertia

In this project students will build a lunar lander than must land on the moon while dealing with gravity and inertia. Credit to actruncale who built the original project and on which this one is based. The purpose of this project is not to build a video game as was done by actruncale but to teach students how to use recursion in software for programming concepts like gravity and inertia. I have two enhanced versions of this program with animation for thrust and one that uses a WeDo Lego motion sensor to build a joystick that controls the lander. I will post detailed instructions on these projects later.

Resource Files
application/octet-stream iconSImple Lunar Lander
application/octet-stream iconEnhanced Lunar Lander
application/octet-stream iconEnhanced Lunar Lander With Joy Stick Controls (Lego WeDo)
Other Files: 
application/pdf iconLunar_Lander_Directions.pdf
Comments
Oren Mutz
Member
February 01, 2012

Cool work,

I really liked how easy you made Recursion work,

O><M

Michelle Choi
Member
November 28, 2011

Hi Wade,

What a fun project! People are always interested in how to do gravity and inertia in Scratch so thank you for sharing the directions and sample projects. Is there perhaps a gallery link to your student's projects that you could post here? I'd love to see how they turned out!

M

 

Wade Gemmell
Member
December 09, 2011

Thanks Michelle,

 

Yes, my class publishes its work as cheam_grade_5_6 on the Scratch Site.

 

Wade