Twelve weeks on LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, one hour a week. Students build a working robot in the first month, learn what actually makes it fast or strong, program it to sense the world, and finish with a sumo tournament. Written for a one-hour weekly slot and free for any coach to take and reuse.
The one rule: guess first. Before students test anything, they write down what they think will happen. Then what actually happened. When those two don't match, they've found something they didn't know — and that's the whole point of the notebook.
Every week builds on the week before — by week 4 each team has a machine that is genuinely theirs, and they spend the remaining eight weeks making it smarter. Students work in fixed teams of three or more, rotating through builder, programmer and tester.
| Week | Session |
|---|---|
| 1 | Build and test — assemble the base, drive exactly one meter, measure how far off you were |
| 2 | Grip and strength — traction, friction, and surviving a hit |
| 3 | Speed or strength? — gear ratios, settled with a tug of war |
| 4 | Design your fighter — the robot they keep for the rest of the season |
| 5 | Motors and movement — precise turns, repeatable distances |
| 6 | Loops — making the robot repeat itself without repeating your code |
| 7 | Touch sensor — reacting to a wall, and to another robot |
| 8 | Color sensor — staying inside the ring |
| 9 | Ultrasonic sensor — finding an opponent before it finds you |
| 10 | If / else — the robot decides for itself |
| 11 | Design the edge — attachments, wedges, and last adjustments |
| 12 | Sumo tournament |
Two documents carry this curriculum, and neither is a download. Students get a printed engineering notebook built on one rule — guess first, then record what actually happened. Instructors get a session plan for each week: setup, a minute-by-minute run of show, and what usually goes wrong. If you are running this with your own team and want either, email us and we will send them over.
Six sets of LEGO building instructions cover all twelve weeks — download them from LEGO Education's own site. Everything after week 4 is a small attachment onto the same base, which is why the robot never has to come apart.
ev3-rem-driving-base The chassis. Week 1, and the foundation for everything after.gear-building-instruction Week 3 — the swappable gear pair for the speed-versus-strength test.ev3-medium-motor-driving-base Week 5 — adds the medium motor for attachments.ev3-touch-sensor-driving-base Week 7.ev3-rem-color-sensor-down-driving-base Week 8 — sensor faces down to read the ring edge.ev3-ultrasonic-sensor-driving-base Week 9.Per pair of students, for the whole semester — the robots stay assembled between sessions.
1 × EV3 core set Retail or education set both work. Builds are incremental, so a set stays committed to its pair all term.1 × laptop EV3 Classroom or EV3 Lab software. Needed from week 5 onward.Ring A circle of black tape roughly 1.2 m across on a light floor. That's the whole arena.Take it. It's built for a one-hour weekly slot in a school library, so it survives short sessions and students who miss a week. If you run it and something doesn't work, we'd genuinely like to know — that's how the next version gets better.
Email admin@loudounrobotics.org, or start with the coaches hub for the rest of our material.