Robotic Dudes

This week we had our second robotics team meeting. There was still some running around on top of tables (literally and figuratively), but there was a slight shift of the wind. We have a ways to go, but we're making progress.

As I mentioned last time, we discussed some team rules, and I came up with a streamlined version of the rules, which I'm calling the 4 Cs:

• Celebration - be positive, look for the good and say it
• Cultivation - always be learning, sharing with others
• Collaboration - work together, synergize
• Concentration - stay on task, be respectful

I was having a hard time with a good word that started with C and ended in -tion for be positive. I had it down to celebration and conciliation. Of the two, celebration seemed more positive to me. As soon as the word was said, we spent the next few minutes waiting for the impromptu dance party to dissipate as about half the boys did their best Kool & The Gang impression.

I had to explain what cultivation meant. We discussed that working in a garden took work to cultivate or help the plants grow. Learning takes work, but the results can be awesome.

Collaboration was easy, since a big theme of the school is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Kids. As soon as I said synergize, they recognized it as Habit 6 and were good on that one.

I think Concentration was pretty straight forward, too, although I was still getting the last of the Celebration calmed down, so I'm not totally sure.

Everyone put on the board what team names they came up with. They all put in two votes (although there may have been some ballot box stuffing), and then our top vote getters moved on to a final election. It ended up being a close call between Bot Rockers and Robotic Dudes. I was pulling for Bot Rockers, but Robotic Dudes won the day by one vote. After the vote was over, one of the boys said he hadn't voted and he wanted to vote for Bot Rockers, which would have put it back to a tie. We then had a short lesson in politics, "Do you know what happens when you don't vote? Nothing, because you chose not to participate when your vote would have made a difference." And we're the Robotic Dudes for now, although I left the door open for changing the name later if they want to.

They have been anxious to start building something. I wanted to get them in doing something to keep their interest up, so we actually went to programming the robot that I had built previously. Eventually they have to build their own robot, but for now we can learn some of the programming basics. I found an awesome EV3 Tutorial site, so we will be watching those videos during our meetings and practicing what we have learned. Hopefully about the time the other team is done assembling the Challenge Set, we will have some navigating skills.

The first video introduced the various motors and sensors, the computer module everything plugs into, and the programming environment. He then shows how to do some basic driving around - forward, backward, turning, different speeds, etc. We had each boy drop in a Move Steering block and pick what they wanted it to do - turn, drive backwards, etc. A couple of the boys wanted to be different and used a single motor block, which just made it turn in a big circle when that block executed since only one motor turned on at a time. We talked about making sure the programming blocks were activating the desired motor, based on the port they are plugged into on the computer module.

We ran their program a couple times, so they could watch what the robot was doing while each person's block was executing. And time was up.