This page will help you get your various sensors, actuators, lights, etc. working. These are techniques you will almost surely need for your DC robot.
You'll need to demonstrate these techniques concatenated into a Rube Goldberg machine in order to prove you've mastered them. Then you get your second pack with a microcontroller etc. However, be sure to get these techniques working one by one before you try combining them. You are unlikely to succeed if you try to get them all working at once.
Your Rube Goldberg machine should involve all the sensors and actuators, for instance it might go like this: You put a metal ball between an IR emitter and detector. This causes the laser to go on, but nothing else happens until you put the retroreflective tape in front of the laser beam. Then, the reflected light illuminates a phototransistor, and a red LED goes on, but also a motor starts to spin. The motor carries a magnet which turns on a Hall Effect switch every time it passes near, and another red LED blinks on and off once for each rotation of the motor.
You can make any variation on this machine that you want, so long as it demonstrates mastery of the techniques.
Details....
- Using a visible light phototransistor (similar to the IR detector)