A Development of a Projectile Ball Shooter as a Project-based Learning Tool

A projectile ball shooter is developed to facilitate the Thai teachers and their learners to constructively adopt the robotics technology. As a tool to support a project-based learning approach, the ball shooter is deliberately designed to be a platform on which physics and mathematics are seamlessly integrated with engineering and programming to ease the STEM curriculum. Tightly coupled with the current school curriculum, the platform aims to encourage the learners to apply theories to a practical application by working on a hands-on experiment.

The projectile ball shooter consists of four components: (1) ball-driving mechanism, (2) ball-pushing mechanism, (3) infrared sensors, and (4) Arduino-based microcontroller. The ball-driving mechanism is constructed with a pair of motors and a pair of wheels to eject a tennis ball in a projectile fashion. A push-action solenoid is used to actuate the ball into the ball-driving mechanism. The solenoid state is controlled by a relay board. A couple of infrared are attached to the ball shooter frame to indirectly measure the ball speed. A user is able to control the speed of the ball by adjusting the rotational speed of the motors via a commercialized controller. The mechanisms of shooter combine both mechanical and electrical components that are universally available and easily substituted with a variety of alternative options.

Thus, this makes the platform highly flexible and requires multidisciplinary skills to work with. Both teachers and learners are able to freely modify the platform as needed to broaden their interests. For instance, the pushing mechanism can be used as a playground to test new design ideas or more creative solutions.