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 :)