Day 7

Please be sure to show the following to your child, read the whole thing, and discuss how to achieve the mid-week goals this week, this is essential to our team's efforts next Saturday.

Our town-wide scrimmage will be next Saturday October 26, in the Smith Middle School gym from 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. This will be a great chance for your kids to practice and see what the competitions scheduled for mid-November are all about.

To prepare for the scrimmage, we absolutely need team members to get some work done mid-week. The assignments are:

1. Sreehan and Hansini will work on the Core Values Poster. Sreehan started with an excellent draft on a Googledoc: (click the blue link to access and edit). I'd encourage everyone to read through it and made edits that you think would help. I will upload some photographs that could be used to demonstrate the team doing group problem solving, but it would help if one of the kids wrote captions explaining what these were (if I wrote the captions, we'd lose points). To complete a draft of the poster, it would be ideal if you can stop by and pick up the poster board from me before Saturday, print out the Googledoc materials, and attach them to the posterboard using something easily removed (so we can replace with final drafts later without damaging the posterboard). Saturday morning I will be transporting the whole robotics kit and game board and table, so I can't also transport and assemble the posters.  You can find more photos to use on this blog post. You might also want to provide the judges with a QR code or URL link to this blog.

2. Zoharin and Jakshita will work on the Project Poster. I have created a blank GoogleDoc page for this: here's the link, so everyone else can contribute and edit the text. To complete a draft of the poster, it would be ideal if you can stop by and pick up the poster board from me before Saturday, print out the Googledoc materials, and attach them to the posterboard using something easily removed (so we can replace with final drafts later without damaging the posterboard).





3. Miriam will work on the Engineering Summary document. Here's the link to the blank GoogleDoc for this. Again, everyone is encouraged to look at this before Friday evening and make additions and changes.
  Update Sunday Oct 20: Miriam completed a draft of the Engineering Summary.

4. We have four missions programmed: putting two blocks into circles, doing the elevator, and then going from the elevator to the ramp.  Miriam and I will work on building the robot's sensors to do the crane mission. The instructions for building are here, the entire crane mission solution is described here, and the program to run it is available for download here.  We will have the robot set up to run this by Saturday. So, Sazzad if you can recreate the code in the solution page or download the code (I'd do the former, just for computer security), hopefully we can run that mission.

This afternoon (Sunday Oct 20) is likely to be rainy. If anyone wants to come by and work on more missions (I'm sure we can do more blocks into circles and the swing), email me or call me at 512-809-6217 and we can arrange some extra session time today for those who can & want to work on more mission programming and building.
      Update Sunday Oct 20:  Miriam successfully programmed the swing mission.

See you all next Saturday at the Smith Middle School!

There's a lot of information in this page that's important. So I know everyone has read this to the end and discussed it with their kids, please email me (daniel.bolnick@uconn.edu) to confirm you've gotten this far! Thanks!



Looking back on what we achieved this weekend: we made a lot of progress on planning the posters. We discussed all the elements of the Project Poster, the Core Values Poster, and the Engineering Design Summary. The sub-groups listed above had each thought about their poster over the preceding week, and gave short presentations about their ideas for their poster, with feedback from the rest of the team and queries from the coaches to refine their thinking. We also started working on the swing problem on the game board. We built the attachment we need, but need to refine the programming.




We talked a lot about trial and error, and the process of discovery by making mistakes.

I'm really really pleased by how well the group is working together at this point. Everyone is respectful, contributes, and they encourage each other.


















And a video:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-yknrZS7ir996mIZUPTfNlooI38vaRUE

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kfUr6Sx-biIq5Izynlc8M2P8pP0iHOb7

Day 6

We had an extremely productive day today. We solved three robot missions on the game board, and are quickly getting a better idea of how to drive the robot. We have more progress to make, especially learning how to use sensors that help guide the robot more precisely. But even without the sensors, we have succeeded at measuring distances, estimating angles, and programming with 'dead reckoning'.

We have four meetings left before the competition season begins. That's not much time. It is essential that the students make progress on parts of the team tasks at home during the week, otherwise we will not be ready to compete in a month. Each student was sent home with an assignment: either to develop ideas for text and graphics for the Project, or for the Core Values. We need to make a poster for each of these. Your student should have a draft version of their poster done BEFORE we meet next week. Then everyone will comment on the text and graphics ideas, we will do a round of revision or further research, then we will get the posters finished two to three weeks from now. Please be sure to have your kid work on their poster assignment. I gave each student some information of what is expected for this, that can be used for ideas. Feel free to email me if you need additional details or feedback. I will be checking in mid-week to ask for a progress report. We cannot compete unless students make progress on this mid-week.

I will send around a video by email of a successful robot mission

For future reference, here are instructions for building various features onto the robot base.