Day 3

Day 3 began by setting up the mission board on the new table, delivered by Mary from FLL Glastonbury. We then discussed the team name (brainstorming board pictured below):

We settled on Antroids. Ants work together as groups to build ant colonies that are carefully engineered to manage their environment for food, comfort, and safety. We thought they illustrate our core values of teamwork and hard work. The latter half of the name is a word play on 'Androids'. So, Antroids are robots that work together to form a team. We even sketched out a logo, which I developed more after. A draft logo is pictured below, but is still open to modification if anyone has any suggestions


We then worked on starting the robot programming, but ran into difficulties connecting the iPad. While Coach Sazzad worked on fixing that, we turned to a discussion of our project.

Project ideas included:
1) wireless technology to connect pedestrians (joggers, bikers) with possible hazards (cars), to alert them to oncoming risks.
2) Protecting animals in the community
3) reducing fossil fuel reliance by shifting to solar power
4) solar cars and promoting use of electric cars powered by renewable electricity sources
5) Picking up litter. Can we make a robot that picks up litter? We also talked about ocean plastics as a serious pollution problem.

We ended with a tutorial on how to program the robot. We got it to drive on the game board a bit, and will focus on this next time.




ASSIGNMENTS FOR THE WEEK:
1. Zoharin took remaining legos home to work on more lego parts for our game goard
2. Everyone should write a few sentences in their engineering notebook to answer  the following question:
a) What is your perferred Project Topic?
b) What do you want to  do about the project? Can you  think of a possible solution to the community problem?


Some resources, looking ahead:
After extensive searching, I finally found the detailed lesson plans for the robot lessons.
There's an overview of the lessons here, and shorter information on each here.

They also kindly provide instructions on how to build the robot to do the crane mission, and program it.

Turns out, we spent this past week building the wrong base, because the instructions were ambiguous. Looks like we were supposed to start with this base instead: INSTRUCTIONS.

Looking ahead, I found a website with suggested tricks for solving various missions.