Session 4 Challenges - Color Time

ShooterBot

Color Sorter

JFLL Meeting

Great meeting on Saturday! We talked about the Body Forward challenge and Biomedical Engineering.

• Kinison
• Gabe
• Leheru
• Andrew
• Walker

Thank you parents - Jennifer, Gunner, Don and Robbie

2010 Tax Credit Form

Can be downloaded HERE

Please consider submitting your Tax Credit donations to the SSAB - Tucson Technics club.

Learning resources

Accord Education

Advanced Math and Science Program (AMSP)

MathMatters (4th / 5th)

Scratch by MIT

CodeBlocks C++

http://competitions.accordeducation.org

Gauss League

Learn Scratch

Meeting cancelled due to Teacher Conferences

Today's Tucson Technics session is cancelled due to school teacher conferences.

JFLL Meeting last Saturday

A good start. We went over some of the mini-challenges available to be used in developing ideas. We discussed Biomedical Engineering.

Hopefully, more will come to next meeting. :-)

JFLL meeting at SSAB - 12:30 Saturday

Saturday we have a meeting at SSAB at 12:30 for Junior FIRST LEGO League (JFLL).

This year is about Biomedical Engineering.

Hope you can make it!

NXT Bricks

Kinison



Jordan

Robot from Kinison

Assignment 3

Session 3 Challenges - Diameter

Diameter


Rotations


Calculated Rotations

JFLL Anyone?

Yes, we are registered with Junior FIRST LEGO League (JFLL). Who wants to participate? Let me know if you are interested.

This year's topic: Biomedical Engineering

Challenge Material

Serious Play Elements List

Poster
Coloring Poster

Serious Play

Coaches Guide

Field Trip to the U.A. - Saul Griffith

Last night part of the Tucson Technics went on a field trip to the University of Arizona (U.A.). There was a speaker named Saul Griffith and he talked about energy.



Useful/Related Sites:

OtherLab

WattzOn

Energy Literacy

OnYaCycles

Makani Power

How Toons

Email Saul

Here are some pictures taken at the event:

Saul Griffith and Walker

Jerzy W. Rozenblit and Walker

Professor and Head of Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Matt Bunting and Walker



More Pictures:

Value of Tucson Technics

The other day during the 2nd session of the season a remarkable thing was taking place.

One group, Team Blind, was solving a challenge but things were not working out the way they had expected (a servo motor was not working). They called me over to have a look.

The conversation went something like this:

Team: "Our motor isn't working."

Coach: "What do you think the problem is?"

Team: Stopped looking at me and shifted their focus to the NXT Brick, the Servo Motor and the program they had written. Immediately, something had happened. Things got quiet for several seconds. Then came a flurry of responses...

Team: "Maybe the motor is broken?"

Coach: "If you suspect the motor is broken what can you do?"

Team: "Try another motor?"

Coach: "OK"

.... So they tried another motor. Same results - no action.

Team: "Hmmmm?"

Team: "How about the cable?" (the said amongst themselves - coach out of the loop :-))

... they tried a different cable connecting the servo motor to the NXT Brick - still not working.

Team: "How about the NXT Brick?" (so they grabbed a different NXT Brick, downloaded their program - but motor still not working)

Team: "Hmm?"

Team: "Let's look at the program! Yeah, good idea!"

...so they looked at their program, they isolated the motor control section by removing other portions of the program. They ran their program again, and....still not working.

Team: "Let's look at the motor icon in the programming software. A-HA! Here's the problem, we are telling the computer (NXT Brick) to communicate with the servo motoron port A but our servo motor is connected to port C!"

Team: Changed the cable to connect to port C on the NXT brick. They downloaded the program and it ran beautifully!

Team: "Awesome! It works! Hey Coach, look at this!"

Why am I telling you this story? This is solving problems. This is using what information is available, dissecting that information, reprocessing the information and solving the problem. This is engineering!

These kids were proud of themselves and rightly so! They solved it together as a team.

NXT Brick (Computer)

Servo Motor:

Brick animation image