Lesson 15 · 60 minutes
Show & Tell
Explaining your robot to somebody who has never seen it
Today's goal
Explain what your robot does, how it knows, and what still beats it — to an audience that was not in the club.
Ideas in this lesson
- If you can explain it, you understand it
- The interesting part of engineering is the trade-off, not the success
- Demos fail; a good presenter has a plan for that
- Share: this is the third word of Make. Learn. Share.
Sense → Think → Do
Everything, narrated by the people who built it.
How the session runs
- Plan the demo: one behaviour, ninety seconds, one clear thing to point at.
- Prepare the sentence: 'It senses ___, decides ___, does ___.'
- Prepare the honest bit: 'It fails when ___, because ___.'
- Rehearse a failure: what will you say if the robot does nothing on the day?
- Present to families, another class, or each other. Take questions.
Try this
- Explain your robot to somebody younger than you without using the word 'code'.
- Answer honestly: which parts did the robot decide, and which did you decide in advance?
- What would you build next if the club ran another ten weeks?
When it goes wrong
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| The robot misbehaves in front of an audience | Fresh batteries, calibration re-run on the actual demo surface, and a rehearsed sentence about why demos are hard. |
| A group cannot say what their robot does | Send them back to the one-sentence rule from lesson 14. It is never too late to write it. |
Notes for the grown-up
Invite people. The difference between a club activity and a piece of real work is an audience, and the questions from a parent who has never seen the robot are exactly the questions that reveal understanding.