Researchable Projects
Bots & Bugs New! 
Design an interesting tournament using N BIO Bugs ( A good lead-in and an engineer-friendly piece (need a gif for this)) and M RCX based bots. Consider the possibilities that allowing remote control of each allows. (Of course the RCX IR remote sub-system is inferior, as the BIO Bugs have 4 species channels and RCX only 1 god channel. But fortunately this defect has been partially rectified by the good folks at http://www.battlebricks.com/. For some ideas about what makes a tournament and makes it interesting, see my lecture, "Ethics for Robots: Open-ended Ethics & Technology"
Simulations and the "real world" of robotics
Consider our next exercise: Fire in the theatre
George Williams asks us to consider the behavior of a panic-stricken crowd rushing from a burning theatre. A biologist newly arrived from Mars, he suggests, might be impressed by
[the group's] rapid 'response' to the stimulus of fire. It went rapidly from a widely dispersed distribution to the formation of dense aggregates that very effectively sealed off the exits.
If the crowd clogs the exits in spite of strenuous crowd-control efforts, would our Martian be entitled to report that he had observed a crowd that was goal-directed toward self-destruction via sealing off the exits? (Harley Cahen, quoting George Williams).
One way to prepare to design a robot for this exercise is to run through a simulation (think: java applet) of the problem. It may even allow one to try different senors, better, the simbots could be programmed in NQC, etc. Obviously any level of simulation would help and perhaps the more detailed the better.
Normative technologies
"The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encouraged them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion." Salman Rushdie, "Anyone can make 41 mistakes", Globe and Mail, 11 March 2000, p.A15 .
Unfortunately, my use of what I called "conventional platforms" on p. 4 of my Mindstorms review looks pretty dubious in light of Rushdie's observations. There is a topic here to be developed: when is a technology normative? What does this mean? When ought a technology to be normative?
Our Robots and our environment
Battery management: scoring? recycling? replacement in RCX. Lego policy. Ethics of cheap and easy disposability vs. more complex renewable energy. Contrast Fischertechnik robot system, with AC supply and solar options. (Cf. (3) below.)
A pet safe robot?
My kids and I tried out an RCX (RDS Bug, in particular) dragging a table tennis ball and sprouting feelers to entice our cat to play. Play it did, until the gears got caught in its fur. Are there ways around this? Should we try -- that is, is a machine to play with our pets wrong?
More "species" of hardware?
Would another "species" of (toy) robotic hardware change or even undermine conclusions we can draw from our tournament experiments? For example, does competition, coordination, or cooperation depend on all the robots sharing a common hardware basis (or lineage)? I have ordered a Fischertechnik system (cf. http://www.robotstore.com/Cat18_PDF/Cat18_16.pdf ) that someone could use to test this hypothesis. These kits arrived on Monday, 13 March.
Gold and Lead Exemplars
Virtue ethics pioneered an alternative to abstract principles or goals as ways of evaluating agents and their choices. Similarly, it may be useful to point out high and low points in other domains. Here are some first attempts (this was written in 1999):
Domain
Gold Lead Technology Gore-Tex Anthrax as weapon Nation States Sweden Afghanistan