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: