ACTIVITY DESCRIPTION
The activity aims to help in learning the theory of colours composition and vision (spectrum, primary and secondary colours, RGB colours composition) and consists of three separate phases.
- An exploratory physics laboratory on colours.
- A competition-based assessment of what the students learnt.
- The development a final software that will use the computer webcam to identify student's sweater and suggest a matching colour through its onboard LEDs.
It was originally designed to grasp the attention of students with a curriculum focused on the fashion industry and therefore include applications to this specific context, which may help to rise the student interest, especially among girls.
Any of these three passages helps the students to learn different features of mBot programming and takes approximately 2-3 hours for code development and 1 hour to be "played”.
We use the Light Emitting Diodes from the Me Led module as a colour light source to study the additive and subtractive colour synthesis. The Led module is mounted on the bottom, pointing towards the desk (or table or floor) where a white sheet of paper is properly placed as a background.
In the mBlock compiler, we find, in the "Sensing" group, the instruction "turn video on" that uses the webcam image as the background of the stage. We also find the "touching color" statement which returns true or false depending on whether the color of the stage, corresponding to the sprite, coincides or not with the color set in the instruction.
To set the color in the instruction you can click on the "color square" of the "touching color" instruction and then click on the point of the stage which you want to map the color to.
Depending on the color of the stage (webcam) at the sprite a different "broadcast" message is launched to the other sprite of the program.
