In the summer of 2024, CEEO faculty and students engaged in two hackathons with the new Arduino Alvik robotics kit. The Alvik Robot features connectors for LEGO Technic, so students were able to use their LEGO Education SPIKE Prime and Essential kits to build their robots. Their experimentation led to the development of three activity challenges to help people get started using Alvik with LEGO.

At the first hackathon, students worked in small groups and spent 30 minutes building a dancing animal with an Alvik using LEGO pieces and other materials at the center. In that short time, students were able to build and program many different creatures, including a bunny who shakes her tail and a slithering, line-following snake, as shown below.

This resulting placemat is a student-facing document to help others get started with this activity.

In the second hackathon, students worked in small groups to connect Alvik to a LEGO SPIKE Essentials hub through Bluetooth. Students were also challenged to use the laser cutter to add pieces to the Alvik, as shown in the robot below.

Dr. E was especially successful pairing SPIKE Essential and Alvik, creating a mini-me Alvik robot that responded to his SPIKE Essential remote-control bracelet.

Below is the placemat that can be used for this activity. A helpful Bluetooth library is at the bottom of this Notion page.

During the course of these two hackathons, students came up with a lot of fun, wacky builds that led to a third student-facing placement to inspire these types of creations.

Full documentation of the robots built during the hackathons, including code snippets, can be found on this Notion page.