Like most teachers I don't have a background in engineering furthermore like a lot of teachers I don't really consider myself to have an engineering brain. As a result most of the time I've shied away from running these sorts of lessons and instead chose to focus on a standard EV3 (or NXT) model and taught programming instead.
However, this is not always what suits my students. Kids charge towards "Lego Robotics" classes like it's going to involve building huge robots and can easily get disheartened when the lesson is just about sitting on a computer and dragging colour blocks around. So what's a teacher to do with this conundrum? Let loose the control and let students free build? Set a task hoping the students can work out a solution by themselves? (see previous post about Context Help for reasons this can be unsuccessful). I've tried both of these with little success. I also tried introducing Simple Machine lessons to the younger grades and then hoping those skills develop by the time they get to EV3 (again with little success).
Earlier this year my saviour came along, Yoshihito Isogawa.
Yoshihito has around 40 years experience working with Lego and the brilliance of his books comes from the complete lack of text. Usually the books have a few pages of introduction at the front but from there on it's about the images. Simple icons show if the model is about gearing, levers, angle of rotation etc and each model is photographed from a variety of angles to help the reader understand it.
The models are not super complex robots that do it all, instead they are simple mechanisms, 2-3 gears, a rubber band, a double bend liftarm. It is up to the reader to build the model, understand how the mechanism works and either combine it with another design or adapt it to fit their purpose.
For my students I've built a variety of these models which will act as a library for FIRST Lego League. Using these designs the students can see how to change the angle of rotation using gears (or another Lego element) but from there it is up to them to work out how to use this mechanism to solve a challenge (and attach it to their robot).
Yoshihito has four books available on Amazon of which I recommend the EV3 Ideas book as the best. It uses all modern Lego elements while the Technic Idea books use the older style technic bricks, still great but the pieces are less likely to be found in the school (or personal) Lego stash.
(yes these are affiliate links, if you're going to buy the books use these links and help kick back some money for the work I put into this blog, it won't cost you any extra and helps me out)
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