White House Science Fair

Check out this clip from the White House Science Fair where President Obama sees first hand how great students from FIRST FLL and FRC teams are:

Dean of Invention

Check out this new show with host and FIRST creator Dean Kamen as host! Starts tomorrow night at 9pm on Planet Green.

Thanks to Mrs. Cwach for cluing us in on this one!

3.14159265

Yesterday we discovered why pi matters to the real world of our robots. Earlier in the week we had some great discussion and research and each team reduced their project down to 3 possible final options.

I really want to thank all the parents that have been coming to the meetings. Considering the large group of students, I really feel we are progressing better than previous years (largely because of the parent participation).

Coach Locke

Saturday Meeting Reminder

Reminder that we will have our first Saturday meeting this coming Saturday (October 9th) from 9:30am to 11:30am at the school in room 701.

Last week the students worked together to build their starter robots.

Teamwork is hard for us all

This week we learned a little about how necessary teamwork is. I enjoyed watching the students start to come together as they were challenged to work together to turn the tarp over. I'm sure they would be glad to share with you why that was so hard.

We also got an introduction to the programming "language" that the students will use to program their robot.

The students will be excited to start building their robots this week!

Rules and Research

This week we worked on learning the rules of our robot challenge and started to explore the research project challenge. It was cool to see some of the creative ideas for solutions to medical problems that the students came up with. One student suggested swallowing a pill containing a little robot that finds the problem then does surgery from the inside. I have no doubt that such a device will be invented by this generation someday.

If the students get their homework and chores done, you can always review the rules and challenges with them. All the Challenge details can be found HERE.

Next week we will break into our 4 permanent competition teams. I appreciate the parent support thus far. After we break into teams, we may have enough parents such that we could "assign" a parent as a permanent assistant coach for each team. Let me know if you would be interested in taking on that role.

Thanks,
Coach Locke

Week 1

I have really enjoyed meeting the robotics students this week. We will have a large group this year with nearly 30 students. We are getting to know each others names but we have already made much progress on building the mission models.

We will have a display at Family Fun Night this Tuesday so stop by and check out the progress.