Motion Planning Studio
BFS, Dijkstra and A*: watch a robot decide its route
What your child can do at the end
Describe the frontier and visited set of a graph search and read them on a map
The brief
A warehouse robot, a delivery drone and a Mars rover all ask the same question many times a second: what is the best route from here to there? The answer comes from search algorithms. In this studio you draw the map (walls, slow sand, slower mud), pick a planner, and watch it think: which cells it looks at, in what order, and why. You will see breadth-first search ripple outward, depth-first search dive down corridors, Dijkstra carefully weigh every cost, Greedy sprint toward the goal and fall for traps, and A* combine the best of both. Run two planners side by side on the same map and count who expands fewer nodes and who finds the cheaper path.
Skills it develops
How it is assessed
3 graded challenges inside the lab, and 8 questions at the end that check the idea rather than the clicks. Every attempt is saved, so a retry after a mistake counts as the learning it is.