Our future looks good to me!

More Pictures HERE

Score!

The robots are moving along as you can see in the simple example above (or link to video HERE). The students continue to innovate with ways to solve these problems.

Remember, we are NOT participating in the rumble on December 5th and there is no meeting that day either. The upcoming meeting schedule is always available HERE.

Picture Day and Scrimmage

We will have our shirts to hand out this coming Tuesday and while every student is at school with those, we will take team and group pictures. Please send $12 cash or check made out to me with your student to cover the cost of the shirts at your convenience.

We will meet this Saturday from 9:30 to 11:30 at the school to make good progress on the robots before we have our first intra-team scrimmage on Tuesday. Feel free to come and see how the students are progressing.

Thanks for sharing these enthusiastic students!

Great Meeting Saturday!

We had a fantastic meeting yesterday with some amazing accomplishments that I have not seen in 3 years of doing this. The students are doing well on their original robot designs and we had 2 fantastic demonstrations of the use of sensors. One robot followed the south wall VERY accurately and another followed the black line around to the loops in the northwest corner.

I am very proud of these creative students and their progress!

Body Forward

Some hints for next year's challenge have been released:

TAGLINE: “Engineering Meets Medicine”

TEASER: Can FIRST® LEGO® League Teams improve our quality of life? Through the 2010 Body Forward™ Challenge, 9 to 14 year olds will explore the cutting-edge world of Biomedical Engineering to discover innovative ways to repair injuries, overcome genetic predispositions, and maximize the body's potential, with the intended purpose of leading happier and healthier lives.

Look intriguing! One thing I like about this program is that I get to learn something new with every new season.

Just a reminder that the "Cow Town Throw Down" (link) is this Saturday on the Cerner Campus. This is not an official BVMS team event but I will be going up there after our meeting Saturday so let me know if you plan to go and I can show your student some of the big bots up close.

We will be doing detailed work on robot missions and robot designs for the next few weeks. Feel free to come to a meeting and see what we are up to!

Carpe Diem

Research Project

We are persevering through the hard work of developing our research project. At first, this is not always the most fun for the students but, for me, the research is what sets this competition apart from other robotics competitions. This year, the world is our oyster as we look at transportation problems. The students will identify an innovative solution to a transportation problem for their chosen community. Here are some of the possible problems they have identified (we are narrowing from 26 or so):

• Emergency medical response
• Urban/Suburban sprawl
• Internet congestion
• Pirates
  

Housekeeping

• No meeting this Thursday on October 22nd (school is out)
• We will meet next Saturday, October 24th at the JoCo Central Resource Library at 9:30am. Please try to attend because we want research sources other then Google :)
• Cerner is having a demo high school robotics competition on November 7th that is open to the public. If you have not seen the high school program, you will not believe what you see! We do have a meeting that morning but I probably will head up to Cerner right afterward.
  

Fundamentals

We are working away at robot and programming fundamentals but soon will also dive into the specifics of our Research Project. I'm excited to see what the students decide to research. Soon we will start designing and building our final competition robot.

This free program from LEGO will let them work on virtual builds at home. I may spend some time on it in meetings but it is well worth the download and it beats video games :)

Kitty Litter

We found out today why kitty litter comes in a square box! Actually we learned a ton about how packages are shipped and where there is lots of room for optimization in the shipping business. A great talk given by Abigail's dad. Thanks Jeff!

Can't

We also watched a video today from the 60-minutes episode where Dean Kamen's new bionic arm design was featured. I despise the word "can't" and this program shows how we can do just about anything if we try. These students will be the ones to solve these hard problems.

T-shirts and Teams

We will split into our 4 teams on Thursday. I have all the information to order the student's shirts. If you want additional shirts, now is the time to let me know.

Meetings

Remember you can check the schedule of upcoming meetings in the upper right corner of the blog.

Thanks for all the support. The attendance has been astounding!

Chris.

Playing Field

The students have been busily building and we now have our "playing field" complete (minus a few details on the bridge). It looks very cool and should prove interesting. I can't wait to see if teams can keep their robot on top of the bridge should they attempt to go up there.

Sponsors

We are lucky and grateful to have 3 gracious sponsors this year. This will allow us to break into 4 official FLL teams which means that each team will be smaller and more agile. With 26 students, we will have two teams of 6 and two teams of 7. I really look forward to that. I will be forming the teams in the coming week or so. Note that there are still a couple of students that have not turned in a sign-up sheet. I will bug you directly next week for those if they are not turned in because we will be ordering shirts soon.

Handbooks

You can get a soft copy of the student's handbook HERE. We keep each student's handbook in the room but feel free to download and/or print a copy for your student to study after homework and chores.

Come to a Meeting

Please feel free to come to a meeting anytime and see what we are up to. I always keep the little box in the upper right of the blog up-to-date with a list of the coming meetings.

As usual, call me or Mrs. Sullivan anytime with issues or questions.

Thanks for reading,
Chris.

Our Challenge

Our challenge for this year is released! (That's me on the far left)

Smart Move

To see the details click HERE. It would be awesome if you want to spend some time with your student looking the site over. FIRST did a good job this year on the site. Look at the robot missions, rules and the research project. Of course we will cover all this in much detail in the coming weeks. If you get bored, you can see the design team here (grin).

Awesome First Meeting

Thursday was our first meeting. I'm excited that we had 24 in attendance. We visited and just talked about each other and the FLL program. Wow how this program has grown. I started this Blog a couple of days before year #1 so scroll down if you want to see how far we have come.

Next Week

Next week we will start building the models for the table. I will also be at the BVMS Family Fun Night in the 7th grade quad next Friday night (the 11th). Students are welcome to come and hang out in our area if they want but we don't require that anybody be there.

Other Stuff

• We would like to have all corporate donations identified by September 15th so let Jamie (LockeJamie@yahoo.com) know if you or anyone you know is interested.
• Remember that you can send a message to all the robotics parents via the mail list at bvms-blog-subscribers@googlegroups.com but don't worry if you post accidentally because I moderate all postings anyway.
• All days on the schedule that are grayed out are NO MEETING days and the schedule is subject to change. I will let you know a week or 2 in advance if we change the schedule.
  
• Don't worry, I don't plan to fill your email with these postings but I may post a few times the first couple of weeks to let you know how we are doing.
• Please feel free come to any meeting anytime.
  

Thanks for sharing these wonderful students. I am excited by the possibilities this year and it was a real pleasure to meet each and every student!

Thanks,
Chris.

Welcome to BVMS Robotics!

Thanks to all who attended the kickoff. I know how busy you all are.

I'm very excited to get started Thursday morning at 6:30am in room 701!

You can get a copy of the sign-up form here.

You can get a copy of the schedule and contact info here.

Thanks,
Chris.

Season Kickoff and CandyBot

We will have our 2009 season kickoff meeting on Tuesday, September 1st at 7pm in the BVMS Commons.

All parents and students interested are encouraged to attend. See you then!

What: BVMS Robotics Kickoff

When: Tuesday, September 1st, 7pm

Where: BVMS Commons (Cafeteria)

I was 5

What a great accomplishment 40 years ago to land on the moon. Can we learn how to do it again? Will we go to Mars? I hope so...lets help our kids do something great to push the envelope of learning!

Camp resources and pics

Thanks again for a great camp.

I put together a resource page on the Blue Valley Web HERE

I hope we can do it again next summer!

Final Day of RoboCamp

I continue to be amazed by these students. 2 laps of the race course in 22 seconds. I would not have guessed.

Thanks to all that participated in this camp and thanks to those that provided snacks.

Don't forget to thank Mrs. Sullivan and Mrs. Rogers for opening the school during the summer especially during so many construction projects.

Special thanks to Marissa for being by my side and helping students for the last 4 days!

Check back here in days because I will post all the camp materials in case the students want to review, build more, or show you what we worked on.

The Third Day

Weightlifting...what? You thought we were doing robotics? Actually we were trying to understand the different torque required to lift from the elbow versus the shoulder.

Today we worked on NXT-G software and made a stopwatch and traffic light. Tomorrow we will see how far we can get toward programming our robots to follow a line on the mat.

BVMS Camp Day 2

We completed our bridges today and had some fun running Marley over them. We all learned a bit about sturdy LEGO structures. Alan and Jacksen's bridge carried nearley 3 pounds over the 20 inch span. Fantastic! It would have carried more but Marley could only carry the one large can of beans:

BVMS FLL Camp Day 1

Today we worked on NXT hardware basics, embedded computer fundamentals, and LEGO mechanics. The students are working on the LEGO bridge to carry Marley across a 20 inch span (watch for the winning video tomorrow). Tomorrow we will finish the bridge and continue mechanics and move into software.

For those interested, the LDraw tools I have used in development of some of the camp materials can be found HERE.

Chris.

Einstein Lives - sort of, as a Bot!

When I was little I dreamed about stuff like this. How exciting to be a student with the world open to you!

See the Largest Spaceship ever made this month!

There are great opportunities to see the ISS with your own eyes (or even better with some binoculars) this month because there are some close flybys scheduled. Check out NASA's tracker HERE.

Moon and Mars

I talk a lot about going to Mars. The first step is to re-learn how to go to the moon. HERE is NASA's site for the latest moon missions. Cool stuff that this years FLL students will work on in coming years.

Scholarships not just for FRC

Check out this post on FIRST's web site about how Roger Williams University awarded $200,000 in scholarships to this year's winning FLL team. Each member will get an annual scholarship of $5,000.

Many FIRST scholarships go unclaimed every year...see the FIRST web site here for details on how to apply.

RatBot

I like robots that are used to study or simulate animals. Here is an interesting article about a robotic rat.

RoboCar

Check out this new cool robotic platform for research of autonomous cars. Interesting article in the light of our upcoming Smart Move challenge!

KC Science Fair Winner

Guess how this year's Grand Award winner at the Kansas City Science Fair got his start in robotics...you guessed it LEGO. Click here for more about Carl and other Science Fair participants.

Johnson County Library Science Night

We will meet at the school at 4:30 to go and show off our robots!

Summer Camp!

We will have a summer camp for current BVMS FLL students on July 13th through July 16th. This will give us a chance to learn some fundamentals as well as some advanced topics. It will also be a ton of fun!

FLL research projects in action

Take a look at this link for one awesome FLL research project!