First Place Robot Design

Congratulations to the I.S. 93 Eagles! The team won the 1st place in the category of "Robot Design" in the New York City First Lego League Nanquest Competition.

This is the category of the competition where two members of the team deliver an oral presentation about the technical aspects, including design and programming, to a small panel of judges. The judges ask pointed questions to determine the extent of knowledge and understanding of robotic principals and specifics of their design.

The Eagles understand!

I will post pictures soon. I am very proud of the teamwork that went into Sunday's competition. By the way, the Eagles placed 8th and 20th overall in points earned on the competition table.

Permission Slip for FLL Nanoquest, 01/28/07

Please download, print and sign the permission slip. Bring it with you to the tournament Sunday. I will be there at 8:00am. You may want to come then to adjust your program for the light in the gym.

Parking Rules for the FLL Nanoquest at Riverside Park

The directions below will get you to the park entrance at Riverside Drive and West 145th Street.

CARS and VANS: DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR UNATTENDED AT THE CIRCLE – IT WILL BE TICKETED.

• Drive into the park, past the information booth at the 145th St. entrance, over the bridge and to the circle and a look for a Park Ranger giving out parking permits and maps to the lot located on the lower level, below the park.
• When you get your parking permit from the ranger on the park level,Then follow the map to the parking lot. It is a long walk back upstairs from the lot to the gym. To get to the lot, you'll have to go back out on to the streets, follow the directions carefully - we do mean carefully –they’re not that easy to follow.
• Park your car, take the elevator or the six flights stairs and walk back up to the gym.

You need to get the permit to park before you park. It is a very long route to get back to the parking lot. The Gym is built over the parking lot and you have to drive a few miles to back underneath it so please get the permit first!

Use the previous post to get directions to the park.

Next Week is the Competition

One week from today is the First Lego League Competition at Riverbank St Park in Manhattan.

We will meet Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Thursday is an extra practice. We will work until 5:30 Wed and Thur. and till 6:00pm on Friday.

Our future engineers are busy solving missions and practicing their verbal reports about their robots and Robolab code.

LOCATION:

Gymnasium
Riverbank State Park
679 Riverside Dr. (at 145th Street)
New York, NY 10031

The entrance to the park is on Riverside Drive at West 145th Street in Manhattan. Go down near the end of this e-mail for travel directions and VERY important instructions about PARKING.

For directions, go to: Park directions.

SNOW CANCELLATION:

If the weather causes Riverbank State Park to close, we will cancel the tournaments. You may call 718-260-3383, 973-596-3234, or 973-596-3572 for a recorded message regarding our status.

THE SCHEDULE:

8:00am - 9:00am Registration, Robot Inspection
9:30am - 10:00am Opening Ceremonies
10:00am - 11:00am Competition Round I *
11:00pm – 12:00pm Competition Round II *
12:00pm-1:00pm Lunch
1:00pm - 2:00pm Competition Round III *
2:30pm - 3:00pm Award Ceremony

8-9am, 10:00am - 2:00pm - Research Presentations (see below)
8-9am, 10:00am – 2:00pm – Technical Presentation (see below)

NanoQuest Work

The team has been refining segmented missions. Segementing is when students break down a mission to smaller steps. They solve the programming issues for each part-- the segment and then put the segments together to make a complete program that solves the mission.

Then, many times they can put two missions together under one slot in the RCX.

Next Wave of Robots

Robert, Danny and Eugene have built robots that will perform well as FLL robots. Wednesday was really productive after school. All three students have adapted gear trains, imbedded rotation sensors and have anchored decent claws or the third motor. They have steering under control and now can solve missions. Great job!

Abanoub, our newest and youngest team member is showing great potential. He has built a "half-track" robot that has rack and pinion steering with tank treads for power. It's an interesting robot. It reminds me of the picture I posted here. The other Robert has been helping Abanoub out with Robolab essentials and teaching him about "robust design" concepts. He may well be our new star!

Practice Tournament

December 16th is the date for the Queen's Region 4 Robotics Practicve Tournament

That is a Saturday, please set that date aside. We need everyone to participate!

Progress and Activities

We are making progress in class. We are finishing the assembly of the FLL Nano Quest missions.

Not completely sure what you should be doing in class?

These are the four activities that you should be engaged in:

1. Assembling a mission.
2. Building or rebuilding a robot.
3. Programming or re-programming a robot in Robolab.
4. Making entries into your Science Journals or Robotics blog.

Please let me find you engaged in these activities during class time. Of course, everyone helps clean up at the end after we summarize our work period.

Work Group Names

I would like each work group to please post a comment about what their new names are and how you came up the names. Already, the newly named "Geodesiks" told me that while researching, they found this guy Buckminster Fuller and asked if I had ever heard of him. I replied," Why, Yes I have. He was a famous thinker who designed, among other things, a structure called the geodesic Dome, which looks like a soccer-ball house. They said, "That's it!" With a little tweaking they had a name that they came up from their own research. and were able to talk about how he was and what he did.

It just does not get any better than that as a teacher.

This week, if you finished building a working mission to solve- start solving it! That means, if the mission structure your group was assembling is functioning properly, start designing and building a robot that is able to perform actions to solve the mission. Use your Science Journal entries to guide your building-- you already have sketches and notes about how you think you will be able to solve the mission.

Be the 5th person to tell me the name of the Platonic Solid in the right hand corner for a surprise.

Somethings to read about...

I would like you to read about a few programs:

Poly Tech Summer Programs

and the BotBall organization.

This Week. 9/25/06

Works groups for 8TA Lego Robotics at I.S.93 started the assembly of the FLL Nano Quest Challenge missions last week. The groups also did their homework which was to come up new work group names. Since the theme is a molecular one this year I had hoped to get some good names. One group came with the "Geodeziks" because they found some research on Buckminster Fuller and wanted to pay homage to his body of work. What a great name for a work group! They get it that that "geodesic" concerns distances while comparing curves and straightline measurements. I love to hear and see the creativity of my students.

This week we will continue to assemble the missions. Obviously we need the missions to be on the mat instead of in pieces in a bag but... Where is the learning? What I am supposed to learn by following printed directions?

The answer is:

1. Team building and improving the skill of working in a group are the two concepts I am concerned with for one.
2. I also want individuals to pay attention to how the missions were engineered. I have begun to appreciate the cleverness of the design of the missions, not just the idea of that mission. In other words, look at how the pieces of the mission are constructed. we can so much about design and engineering by how other people solve problems and by how they design.
3. Then I want the individuals to discuss and record design and construction techniques within the work group. " Look how the connectors are hidden by the technics beams ." "Look how the pieces are combined to make a different piece."

NanoQuest Challenges IS 93

We are beginning our Lego Robotics program for 2006-2007.

1. We are printing the instructions for assembling the missions.
2. We have each work group focusing on one mission.They will assemble the mission and then describe it to the other groups.
3. Planning our teams. We may field a RCX, NXT,and VEX team this year.

Stay tuned!

We're Back! Lego Robotics at IS 93.

Welcome to the new school year. Last year at IS 93 here in Queens was a great year. We will still have the Lego Robotics club through Beacon, GRYC. We also have an eighth grade class in Robotics. Many major subject teachers "loop" at 93 which means teachers follow their students up in through the grades. I have done the same thing with last year's seventh grade- now that they are in the eighth grade, I have them again. We lost a few students and gained some sharp students.

We will continue our work with the RCX. Two NXT kits are on the way and we'll see what we can do with a VEX kit we got. I would like to enter a VEX competition.

We are pursuing a continued relationship with PloyTech this year. We want our program to grow and we will explore more ways to do that. Every time we do, we make tremendous progress.

Next week, we will go to Manhattan to view the Isler brother's documentary television pilot at the 2006 New York Television Festival. View the trailer. They followed and filmed three robitcs programs and have produced a 22 minute piolt that is competing in the festival contest. One of the teams they filmed was the 93 Eagles. Take some time to explore the Gloaming Pictures website.

Interesting Rule Change fo FLL

Check out changes for the latest in rule changes. The new NXT kits give advantages so to equalize the RCX and the NXT they added rotation sensor allowances.


I can think of some great uses for extra rotation sensors! How about you?

Real World Robotics in the News

I thought this story described a very clever invention. I like reading about the applications of robotics in areas where we might not normally think of.

Be sure to click on the photo link in the story.

Anna Konda

Summer Robotics Never Stops!

My buddies Reed and Ethan came to the beach today and found that my Duplo set was not enough to keep their interest- not when the real deal is here. Robotics attracts very young students who are very capable of understanding robotic concepts.


Click on Reed's picture for a little movie.

Long Break

I hope I was not away too long.

I.S. 93 won the Region 4 Robotics Pentahlon at Aviation HS in June.
I will try to post pictures later.

Today is the first of two days of Robotics workshops at I.S. 93.

Region 4 Spring Robotics Pentathlon and Aviation High School Open House

Beacon is providing bus transportation to Aviation HS. We leave at 7:30am. Bring a lunch.

Click here for permission slip for Saturday. All participants must have a signed permission slip to attend.

We have had a slow start developing really good solutions for these events but the team always seems to pull through.
The best event for I.S. 93, as always, is our technology presenation skills. Any member of our team could present and do well because so many team members know so much about the robotic concepts such as gear trains and robust construction.

Gears Again.

Gear trains are essential for designing and constructing robots to perform how builders intend for the robot perform. We come back to this problem repeatedly. Mastering the construction of gear trains comes with lots of practice.

I re-discovered a nice website to help us with this. It is a Rice University site. I like to use these sites because it shows how the concepts of engineering Lego Robotics is not an exclusively middle school or high school problem-- colleges and universities study these problems and provide rich resources for us to use.

See what you think. I believe that you will benefit by reviewing the information on those pages.

Student Blogs Highlight Student Learning

Check the Student blogs and websites on the right. These are my lego robotic students who are begining to blog which means they are publishing what they learn.

I had hoped they would just do it. Some did. Some did not. As this is new ground for me, I am learning that I have to find a way to make what I want my students to do "a must."

Well, now "they must."

Agenda:
Students will begin to migrate their Lego Robotics Journals to on-line publishing.

One way is to write in "Word" and then copy and paste the text to a blog entry. I find it difficult at first, to write the content, and to figure out how to make the blog entries work. Wilson has chosen to use a different page maker.

Advanced features of blogs or other on-line publishing:

• Embed links and references into the blogs to add definitions and other sources to back up what is being reported or said.
• Add pictures and photos of your own robots from class instead of copying pictures from the web to illustrate your entries.
• Add extra sidebar topics by messing around with the html on the template.

Collaboration:

Go to the other students' journals and post comments on what they have reported about their learning. This may seem awkward or forced at first until we learn how to communicate by blogging and publishing on-line.