Progress Check-in

On Wednesday and Thursday the first week of December, we're at a pivotal point. We're a month into meeting and have about a month left until the competition. It's the halfway mark.

As we continued working on the rocket launch mission where they have to hit the launcher and make the spaceship fly up a certain height, we were trying to find something heavy enough, and one of the kids suggested using the metal sphere that serves as a wheel on the back of the robot. You can use any Lego pieces, and that is from Lego, so it's legal. We're still trying to figure out how to make sure to hit it accurately every time, but with a heavier hammer, there's a better chance of it working.

I asked the kids to demonstrate at the end of one of the team meeting times all the missions and how close they were. They didn't have to work 100%, just sort of work, enough that we could see the idea that the robot would travel and make an action that seemed like it could accomplish the mission. Even if it missed or didn't hit hard enough or whatever, I just wanted them to be able to demonstrate where they were at, more for themselves, to help figure out how much more they have to go. At some point, we will need to connect all the missions, mostly including having the robot return to base where the arm can be swapped out and the robot aimed at the next mission.

The demonstration was okay. Half the missions they demonstrated were things they hadn't worked on in a couple weeks and while they were supposed to be practicing with them to be ready to demonstrate, some of them they hadn't even found the code or re-tested it once. The robot is a little different shape than it was previously with changing out the back wheel for the hammer, so what they programmed before didn't exactly work. I tried to make the point that this is what they were supposed to be preparing for.

We also talked today about the project. I had sort of maybe kind of known there was this other part to the competition but hadn't really looked at this part very hard, since we didn't actually do a competition last year. I remember looking at the challenge a year ago, but since we did a demonstration at the school and not an actual competition, the project didn't feature into what we were doing.

The short description of it is that they pick a problem related to the theme of the year - space, this year - and research a solution to the problem. They were sent home with a homework assignment to come back next week with an idea of a possible problem and solution pair that we could use. They do a presentation that takes under 5 minutes. It can be creative - doesn't have to be totally realistic or ultra-professional. They just have to show they are working together and creatively problem-solving. I think the project sounds kind of fun. One of the kids said, "that sounds boring." I explained that it will be boring if they make it boring or interesting if they make it interesting. So there we are. We'll see tomorrow what they come back with.

Double Up

For the last week of November and moving forward, we've added an extra session each week. Instead of just meeting on Wednesdays right after school, we will be meeting on both Wednesdays and Thursdays. There is a lot to get done with the competition coming up fast.

We broke out on Wednesday and Thursday of this week into groups and had various people working on different missions. One of the missions is close, with the group that has been focusing and working on things. Focus is definitely an issue, as we have a lot of kids and it's difficult to get them all on task at the same time. We've had some parents coming in to help with crowd control a bit, which has been good.

We did have some of them working on a new mission, which functions kind of like the big mallet and bell at a carnival, where you hit the target with the mallet or sledgehammer and it makes the weight go up and hit the bell, except it's a spaceship that has to go high enough to get into orbit. It's a fun one to work on, although to me it seems more error-prone. I assigned one of the team to be in charge of thinking about risk vs. reward and the likelihood of something working or not working to help us focus on the things we know we can accomplish and get some points out of. Not that we shouldn't try hard things, but we want to get some points.

We did confirm the name Digicorns. I guess they're all set on that, so there we go.

The Mission

For our second meeting on November 14, we talked about name options some more. The two top names ended up being Digicorns (portmanteau of Digital and Unicorns) and Rockets. My preferred name from last year, Botrockers, didn't make the final list, which was unfortunate. I told them we would decide between the two names the next week after they had a chance to think about it and make sure they felt good about it.

We also finished building the stock robot this day. A few of the missions were built, so we could show how to do them. We also watched some videos of other people solving the various missions. They had a homework assignment to go home and watch some videos of the various missions and decide which ones they wanted to work on, based on what they thought they could realistically accomplish.



A big issue at this point was realizing the competition is going to be on January 5, instead of February 2, giving us a month less time to get ready.

New Team New Name

I haven't been keeping up with writing down what we've been doing each week. So I'm going to try to go back and reproduce things here as to what we've done over the past month. Our first meeting was on November 7. We kept things fairly simple and talked about team name ideas, introduced everyone, and talked about what some of the missions would be.

We also started building the basic robot. The field wasn't put together yet, but the plans were to have it ready in the next week or two.

No, really

I thought we were ready to start our season earlier than we did last year. I guess we will be starting about the same time. We have an official competition in 3 months, so we have a more firm deadline than we had last year.

We have a good mix of those who have experience from last year and new team members. We also have a mix of boys and girls, which I think will be good. We had a lot of bouncing off the walls on last year's team.

I think we are setting a good foundation for the next couple years with several younger students. Our first meeting is next week, so here we go! No, really this time.

New Year, New Lego Challenge

We are starting earlier with our Lego teams than we did last year. Last year we had our initial information meeting in October and didn't start meeting until November and didn't have the challenge kit set up until weeks after tournaments had already taken place after the first of the calendar year. This year, we had an information meeting in early September and almost have the teams all nailed down.

There are two or three times as many students interested in doing Lego Robotics this year compared to last year. There are many new students and many who have experience. We went into things last year knowing we were just setting the stage for this year. I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Images

Just some random images I've saved over the last little bit, because I thought they were funny:

Facebook = AOL

I remember in the late 90s being at the house of a friend who was (and is) very tech savvy. The thing that blew me away was that he was dialing up to AOL and looking something up through their portal. Why would anyone use AOL for anything? Well, anything other than creating wall-sized art projects with all the AOL CDs they had gotten in the mail.

The problem is that it was a closed community. It simplified and filtered out the raw parts of the full Internet. It tried to create a one-size-fits-all view of the Web, and by doing so limited the interesting bits, and the potential for growth was stymied.

In the years that followed, AOL declined in favor of interesting startups that promised the world. Some lasted. Some didn't. I still miss the blogging days of about 2006-2010 when the Web seemed limitless, and everyone was so excited to be sharing information with each other. Around that time, however, Facebook opened to everyone and provided an easy to use platform that was filled with hip college students who had been using it out of sight of prying eyes.

Facebook grew, adding in messaging, unlimited picture sharing, a mobile app, and so on. It structured things more rigidly than MySpace. It became the place where everyone who wanted to communicate was on it. Only the Luddites avoided it.

Fast forward to the growth of advertising, meddling Russians, commercial adoption, and the dagger to the heart - the news feed algorithm. I think having companies on FB is not bad, as they can provide an easy way to message and provide deals to their customers. But ripping out the reverse chronological feed of simply everything posted by everyone you knew and were friends with, in favor of FB deciding what it thought you would want to see, that is to me the beginning of the end.

A former student of mine who got a job as a project manager at FB after taking my project management class (before even completing the rest of the degree program and graduating), told me that it is all numbers driven. FB knows that people who use the algorithmic news feed spend significantly longer on the site than those who use the most recent chronological feed. I think that's because they are confused and can't find what they want. Or because most of the content is hidden from the chronological view and only shown on the news feed. The news feed is the default, and I'll often see a glance of something interesting before I switch to the most recent feed, and as I scroll down through the most recent posts, the interesting item from someone who I am friends with never comes up, even when it should.

Then it hit me. We've just rebuilt AOL. We have a one-size-fits-all platform, tightly controlled by their corporate decision makers. We have control of content handed to advertisers. We have an experience that is locked down to be as simple as possible. Look only at the death of blogs for an example of this. It used to be that people would write daily or maybe a couple times a week but at least monthly. And they would write a lot. They would customize the look of the blog, although generally without getting too much into MySpace-esque horrid background designs. The most important, though, is that they would write a lot. Long articles they would work for a long time on, with curated pictures embedded right in the text where it was discussed. Bloggers would link to other blogs or posts on their own blog. The comment section would run wild. What do people write now? A couple sentences? Maybe a full paragraph? Pictures are out there sort of with no context other than a short description. If a post is longer than a couple sentences you can click on a link to show more, but if it's longer than a couple paragraphs it loads into a totally new page that people don't even wait for it to completely load to shut it down. TL;DR (too long; didn't read) becomes the name of the game. That to me is the saddest part of it. We lost thoughtful discussion and editing of deep content in favor of clicking a like button and a couple sentences of writing. The biggest innovation was the reaction buttons where you could not only like something but mark it as something you dislike or are angry or surprised about. We don't even need to write a response showing our surprise. Just click the surprised button.

My favorite part that keeps me coming back to FB every day is the memories, where it will show what you posted on that day some number of years ago. It's a fun way to relive things that have been posted over the past 10 years or so. It's a little private section of memories just for me (that I don't reshare, although some people do). But what is the majority of content on my wall? I've posted about this a couple times recently, here and here, and it hasn't changed much, so I won't do an update. But it's just curated content from big media companies for the most part.

Think about when you do see something interesting on FB, and you go to tell someone else about it (IRL), chances are they have already seen it. Everyone else has already seen the same viral video, the same breaking news story, or the same joke or meme. Think about how decades ago before the rise of cable, everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time, with some time shifting as VCRs became popular. Then cable hit, and everyone was watching different shows. Eventually we had DVRs and later ubiquitous streaming options. But we've cycled back around to everyone watching the same shows or other content. If you're behind on a series, you have to avoid FB so as to avoid spoilers, but then you miss other things, too, so you have to catch up with everyone else.

We have moved away from a creation- and sharing-oriented platform to one of consumption. It's easier to consume what others have created than to create and share our own. And who is creating that content that we are consuming? Big media that invests heavily in FB to keep our attention, because we are afraid of missing out if we disconnect.

Humor Rules

A few random notes to remember from Scott Adams' podcast about humor:

Adams discussed what he called the 2 of 6 rule. The idea is that there are 6 elements to make something funny. For something to then be funny, it needs to have at least 2 of the elements. If it has even more, that's better. An excellent comedian will be able to hit 3 points. A 4 of 6 is rare. The elements are:

• Mean
• Bizarre
• Clever
• Naughty
• Recognizable
• Cute

That's why a sitcom will always have a small child or pet, since that adds an element of cute. Adams plays with Dilbert in the recognizable realm. When he has Dogbert (cute dog wagging his little tail) say something mean, that puts him at a 3 before he has even decided on the joke.

Some corollary principles have to be considered as well.

One is that about 30% of the public has no sense of humor. They won't know a joke even if it has 5/6 elements in it.

He also discusses punching up vs. punching down. The idea is that if someone is in some type of power situation, a joke is less funny and possibly offensive for the higher power person punching down at the people below them. He discussed a few examples of Donald Trump and things he said while on the campaign trail, which now seem like he was punching down, but at the time when he was yet unelected, he was punching up. Punching up makes it more funny, because you're getting back at The Man.

Another principle is that the funnier a joke is, the more you can get away with. I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think at some point they hit all 6 points, even if not all at the same time. There are some pretty raunchy things in there that they get away with, because the rest of it is so funny.

The final principle is what he calls the Uncanny Valley. This is where if you have something that is artificial, but obviously artificial, it can come across as cute - most of the droids in Star Wars fall in this category - BB-8 is cute, because it is nothing like a living thing. But if something artificial is almost realistic but not quite, it becomes disgusting or creepy. Think here of staying at a family member's house and waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a row of dolls staring back at you. Almost realistic, and very creepy! I think the main reason for this principle is that if you're going for cute, make sure you don't cross the line into creepily almost-realistic.

Next time you need to make up a joke, grab as many of the principles as you can, make sure you punch up, and don't be creepy.

Tragedy of the Common Carrier

The Tragedy of the Commons is a well-known example in economics of how a common or public resource can be destroyed through over-use.

Adam Smith's famous Invisible Hand worked differently as he applied it to privately owned resources. Take the richest person you can find, and their wealth and resources are distributed to the poor due to the fact that the rich person will hire others to help take care of the estate. They can't possibly consume everything they own or create, and they can't take care of it either. Hiring someone poorer than them helps to maintain or grow the estate, while benefiting others at the same time. This is in some way the basis for Trickle-down Economics.

A commons, however, is a public space, with no majordomo to place limitations on its use. The tragedy comes in when this public resource is overused to the point that it becomes useless. Normally individuals acting in their own self-interest will provide a net benefit to society through their actions. The problem is that public lands can be overgrazed, roads can be shut down by gridlock, and a once-beautiful park can be spoiled by trash.

The stock market has the potential to be destroyed by those large players who manipulate it in a variety of ways.

I think our phone system has all but passed this point. Between mobile phones, the Internet, and scam calls, something major needs to happen to fix the problems that our common carrier phone system is faced with. There used to be natural limitations on abuses of the phone system, long distance calling rates being one of the biggest. There is no security system in place with our phones, as they were built as a commons, to allow anyone to call anyone if you had their number (and these were published). With the advent of free calling via VoIP, the minimal cost gatekeeper is gone, and untraceable nuisance phone calls flourish. Scammers are riding a dying wave, as fewer and fewer people have a landline anymore, and fewer people answer phone calls that they aren't expecting. There are still a few people left to scam, so they continue trying, and as they do, they hammer their own coffin even tighter.

With many messaging and voice apps available, we still have options to communicate within private systems. This requires that everyone maintains multiple accounts, in order to have the ability to talk with different groups. Those under Apple's spell are locked into their communication tools, yet there are many other providers. Facebook had gotten too big and has taken a stumble because it got away from its original mission and sold out to scammers and advertisers, so alternatives arise. It is a pain to deal with so many protocols and username/password combos, but the pain and cost is what puts up just enough of a wall to keep tragedy at bay.

Have a great summer!

About a month ago, we had our last session for the year (meeting 17), plus our demonstration night. For the last meeting, it was fairly quiet. We kept it simple and just practiced the tasks that had been previously completed. Sort of.

One of the boys had his project lost, because it was stored on a local laptop instead of being uploaded to our cloud storage with everything else. It wasn't quite done anyway, but that was a frustration that we're going to try to knock out quickly for next year, with a place to store everything right up front. So he actually picked a different task and was able to get it to work. The task to flush the toilet, which activated a waste processing plant on the other side of the field was pretty neat, yet simple enough to do it quickly.

A couple of the small teams just kind of played around, figuring that they had tested their task well enough the previous week.

One team really spent the entire time running their task over and over again.

When we got to the competition, er demonstration, we went first. I wasn't sure how far along the other teams had gotten, but as I watched them later, they had the same struggles we had.

The team that practiced all day had to run their task about 10 times before it finally worked. It was working four out of five runs in practice and then was just slightly off on the day of. Oh well. The toilet flushing also had to be run several times before it hit just right. Two of the other teams who didn't practice at all the day of had issues.

And one of the boys whose task was always working, every time, hardly ever any issues, didn't show up. And we didn't know how to run his code, since we couldn't find it on the robot's memory. If we knew he wasn't going to be there, we would have had him show us and had someone else practice running it for him. He had cub scouts instead, which is fine. It just would have been nice to know so we could show off another task performed.

We've already started talking about next year, knowing that this year was getting a foundation in place to be able to start early and be ready to do a real competition.

Wrapping Things Up

Meeting 16 of the Robotic Dudes was fairly low key today. We hadn't met last week due to school being out of session on Thursday. Next week is our final meeting, and that evening we will hold a demonstration/competition among the various teams at the school for the families.

Some involved are very hesitant to call it a competition, favoring instead the demonstration aspect of it, but Lego talks about coopertition being a key principle of the challenges - a combination of cooperation and competition. We want to work together and learn from each other, but we also want to try hard to win. So I hope we win. ;)

We kept it kind of quiet today. We had everyone work on repeating their tasks several times to make sure everything was set up where it needed to be, with the robots pointing in just the right direction. A rotation of just a couple degrees in angle could result in the robot being several inches off from where they needed to be for their tasks.

There were one or two of the team who were starting to work on a totally new task on the complete opposite side of the field, which I tried to explain wasn't likely to be done by the time we show things off next week. In the end, I just let them do what they wanted to do.

This whole first year really has been setting us up for success next year. There are a lot of things we'll be able to look at doing different or better, in addition to having some experienced people on the team. The one thing from my observations and interactions that I'd like to see is just overall taking things a little more seriously. Now, I'm all for having fun and enjoying one another's company, so I'm not talking about being more serious. We just need some more organization and help with focusing on working on the tasks and learning more about methods of programming that will take our performance to the next level. I'd also like to not being losing and breaking parts all the time. Half the challenge board is disassembled, so we can't even do all parts of the challenge. If someone wants to do a Legos club where they just build whatever they want, someone can sponsor that, but for Lego Robotics Club, we should be building some awesome robots. I'm looking forward to that.

Demo Day

We don't have a robotics club meeting today, since it is a half day of school. Last week, we did have our 15th meeting. We are looking at holding our competition / demonstration at the end of this month, just before spring break. The idea is then at that time, a lot of things like soccer and other outdoor activities start happening as the weather warms up and we get closer to the end of the school year. So I think once we have that demonstration, while it's possible that some of the boys may want to continue meeting, we will likely be done for the year at that point. We're looking into shirts or medals or something to hand out as a reward for participating.

So last week we worked for a while on polishing up what we were working on. We talked about being realistic and what they thought we could get finished up by the end of the month. I had each of the small teams work on what they were close on and demonstrate what they had. They didn't have to be perfect, just show where they were at, so we could judge how close it seemed like they were.

We basically have four activities that look like they are close, that people have been working on. One of them is pretty complicated and may or may not be finished. Two are basically functioning most of the time now. Every now and then they don't totally work, but as they work on fine tuning them, such as making sure the robots start from the same place every time and so on, I think that success rate will go up. The fourth task should be simple, but more often than not it ends up being kind of a brute force, run over the parts type of thing, which maybe technically works, but it would be nice if we can get that one working without knocking everything over.

It was nice to see some success. I know part of the goal with the robotics this year is to be prepared to do something bigger (and earlier) next near. Most of the tasks we've completed are fairly simple ones, close to the home base and don't take much maneuvering to get to. What would be great is if next year we could purchase the whole challenge kit and have the table ready right as school was starting. That way we could have the teams start meeting and knock out some of the basic tasks quickly, freeing them up to work on some of the more advanced parts or the ones that are difficult to get to on the other side of the board.

Slogging Through

Meeting 14 was last week. We had most of the team there, but with some of the things we had put in place previously in terms of organization, we were generally on task. One of the things we need to do, which was suggested by our assistant coach, is to have each group schedule a time during our meeting where they will have access to the robot. We have two robots, ours and the one belonging to another team. We share since we aren't there at the same time, so it makes a lot of sense to use each other's robots. Still, only two robots, when we have 4 teams of 2 or 3 people each, there is still a robot bottleneck.

Sometimes you can test things out in your head and build accessories and do other things that don't necessarily require the robot itself. Other times, you just have to run it and see what happens.

We have a few portions of the challenge that are there or at least close to there. One is the water filter, which is just pushing in a certain spot to slide the filter into place. Another is the rain. It requires driving at just the right angle and bumping the switch that drops the water. Those two are pretty much working. Another is the pump. That team kind of comes and goes in terms of how close they are, but it's pretty straight forward - just driving forward and hitting one of a couple different levers. Each of those three are close to the home base and just require a quick drive and pushing, sliding, or lifting a single switch. Another more complicated aspect of the challenge is removing and replacing the broken water pipe. That one is close, although we need to simplify it. Right now, he's trying to carry out the new piece, set it down to remove the old piece, and then he will pick up the new piece again and drop it into position. I think setting it down and picking it up again is going to be error-prone, so we need to talk about how to simplify that action.

There are several parts of the challenge that are missing from the board. I'm not totally sure if that is because they are just put away because they were broken or otherwise disassembled. The STEM Lab where we meet is used by several robotics teams, plus several other student groups like Odyssey of the Mind, and I'm sure there are others. The problem is that there isn't always respect for each other's things in there.

I did ask one of the team members to leave about halfway through, since he was not on task and was throwing things around the room. The kits are expensive. I'm sure we've already lost a few pieces due to things falling on the floor. As soon as they start throwing things, though, we're dealing with both losing the Lego pieces and damaging things that belong to other groups who use the room.

Organization

For meeting 13, we had an interesting idea from our assistant coach. Basically, we have been having problem with focus and getting the team to stick to the various assignments they had. He mentioned that he's surprised adults are able to get as much development done as they do, as they often run into similar issues. But even more for the elementary school kids, who don't have experience.

The suggestion, which we jumped on and had the team do is organize themselves into several small teams and then write down those assignments. It's not that we hadn't tried that previous, since we had, but actually writing it down and making sure everyone was happy with their assignment seemed like a good idea. For the rest of the meeting, as I saw someone wandering around or off task, I'd just ask them what their task was and if they were working on it. More often than not, they'd get back on track.

We had a couple of the teams either be able to accomplish their task or at least get close to it, which is encouraging. Others are still trying to do things that are probably more complicated than they need to be.

Inspiration

For our 12th meeting (which was a couple weeks ago), I figured we needed something to shake things up a bit. We have been using the generic robot design, with just slight changes to the arm out front, so I looked up several videos showing teams who have created a variety of different types of robots to solve as many parts of the Hydrodynamics Challenge as possible.


We watched three different ones, with all very different approaches and takeaways. Above is one of the three videos we watched. The main takeaway is that they were very creative in how they built the base robot and the various appendages to perform all the tasks. They also aimed to solve several tasks back to back, so an arm might move one way to drop something in a certain place and then it moves back the other way to slide a piece somewhere else. They even left pieces out on the field if they were no longer needed.

They have been mostly trying to program the robot to move around and do things with the simple arm, but this opened them up to the idea of building more, which they were excited about. One thing we do need to come back around to is the idea that they need to build the machines as simply as possible and in a way that they won't break easily. A few of the team were trying to activate a lever and used a bunch of complicated gears, when just a bump with a large arm would have done the job.

Our helper was missing for this session, but we were largely focused given the inspiration provided by the videos.

The Help Has Arrived

For our eleventh meeting of the Robotic Dudes, we had a helper come, which was great to see. We had three of the team missing, which helped it be a bit calmer, plus having an assistant coach shifted the dynamics a bit.

We had two groups working on solving various tasks in the Hydrodynamics Challenge. There were still a couple of boys just sort of wandering around and one who left early. One of the teams just had to have the robot drive forward a couple of feet and lift a lever to dump out a water barrel. They came pretty close to getting it to work. Another team was trying to pick up a broken pipe, but that team had to get the robot to navigate quite a bit further before grabbing the pipe, so more room to be off slightly. I think they need to use the light sensor to turn based on when they hit some guidance lines on the ground.

I attended a Vex competition a week or so, which my nephew was competing in. I had signed him off on the Robotics Merit Badge and thought it would be a good idea to come check out how Vex works. It is similar in some ways and different in others to how the Lego Robotics works. With Legos, there are many more intricate tasks to perform. The precision required is pretty crazy. With Vex, the tasks are more gross motor, picking up or pushing around plastic rings about the size of a donut. Also with Legos, only one team is on the board at a time. There are two boards side by side running concurrently, and there is a part where you can drop something on the other side of the field, but it is very minimal interaction. With Vex, you're on the same board so can run into each other, but you actually work in cooperation with each other for part of the challenge. Legos is completely autonomous, while Vex has both autonomous and remote control modes.

Pseudocode

Last Thursday we had our 10th Robotic Dudes meeting. It started a bit slow with people running around again, and we had another discussion regarding the need to focus. I think it may be starting to sink in that they're not going to be able to continue coming if they aren't actually working on something.

We are supposed to be getting another helper, a USU student with some programming background, who will be coming to help with crowd control and answering questions. At this point, we really need to get going on programming. Of course, that wasn't helped much when we showed up and all the computers that are normally in the STEM Lab were gone. So we talked about pseudocode, which is a way of stepping through the logic of a program without actually writing code.

I had the boys grab their notebooks and write out how they could logically work on certain tasks. I think it was good, but they needed to be a bit more detailed in their pseudocode. They would write things like drive forward and lift the lever, instead of how it would know how far it had gone or what type of motor would be activated to lift the lever.

Nine Lives

Our Robotic Dudes last week was fairly uneventful from a productivity standpoint. It was our ninth meeting, and honestly I don't that we got much done. The challenge kit and table are fully assembled and in the room where we can actually work on them, since they wrapped that up in preparation for STEM Night. We started by talking about how STEM Night went and what goals people had for moving forward. We also talked through a few of the challenge options and broke into some teams based on which challenges people wanted to work on. But about half the group just ran around out of control, not paying attention to what we were doing. Does that mean we're in the Storming phase of team development or have we regressed to Forming? The ideal is that moving forward we'll have some additional adult supervision to help out.

STEM Night

Last Thursday was meeting 8 of the Robotic Dudes. We were preparing for the STEM night, which was last Friday. We didn't have to do a presentation, just take turns with the other Lego teams from the school manning a booth with the challenge table and a couple robots. We were to just be there working on things and talk to people as they came up to us.

In our meeting on Thursday, it was a pretty low key work day. We were broken up into a couple different groups. As usual, some were working harder on things than others. One of the boys was singing Weird Al's The Saga Begins, a spoof of American Pie about Star Wars Episode I. It is one of my favorite songs (both Don's and Al's versions), so I put it on the room's speakers. Then I somehow turned into a DJ, taking requests for songs they wanted to hear. I was hoping the background music would help them focus some, but it actually distracted a little bit. It wasn't too bad, as I turned it down so it wasn't too loud. I was kind of surprised that Lukas Graham's Once I Was Seven Years Old was the most requested song. I don't think they were going to let me out of there without playing it. I mean, it's a good song and all. I guess they like channeling their inner seven year olds.

The actual STEM Night was pretty good. There were a lot of people there, throughout the school. The star gazing was a big hit, with a portable, inflatable planetarium. I didn't make it inside as there were a lot of kids lined up to go in there. There was a 3D printing station, some dogs from the humane society, and paper airplane contest. They had pizza and lots of science exhibits from the university and other groups around town, so a good atmosphere.

As for our particular station, I think it was okay. The other teams did the first shifts. Those teams seemed pretty well behaved and able to talk to people about what they were doing. We were at the end. I thought the crowds would have thinned out more by then, but people seemed to be sticking around. We had to clean everything up, which wasn't too bad. Several of the challenge pieces were broken, or maybe better said slightly disassembled, from everyone wanting to touch them. Some of that is from random kids and adults looking at things and some of it was from our team not being able to keep their hands off. I was a little surprised at how excited some of the team was, like they had never seen the challenge kit before, grabbing pieces they wanted to play with and yelling like they were at a birthday party. I mean, it was loud in there already, with as many people as were crammed into the cafetorium (combined cafeteria and auditorium), but I guess it's good that they're still excited to be there.

Ringing in the New Year with Robots

Last Thursday we had our seventh meeting of the Robotic Dudes. A few days before our meeting, one of the other coaches contacted me about sharing robots, which I think will be a great thing. At this point, we've all built the basic model straight out of the book. The idea was that if we've all got stock model builds sitting there in the closet, we might as well share them so we can have several groups working on their own hardware at the same time in the class.

Based on the kindergarten feedback, I had one group working on adjusting the robot's arm so it would be two separate arms that would alternate up and down instead of one larger arm with both sides going up and down together. I gave them a little hint which gear they might use to make it work, and they did the rest. They put some little "hands" on the ends of the two arms, and it worked great. At that point, their unfocused creativity took over, and they spent the rest of the time building a big tail and putting ears on it so it looked like a dog or something. As soon as they left, I took off the tail, but I did leave the ears on it. Mostly, I didn't want the other team when they borrow our robot to have this big thing hanging off the back of it.

Honestly, I think that in addition to having a robotics club, they should just have a Legos club, since that seems to be what a few of them are most interested in - just building stuff with Legos. I've explained a few times that they need to learn to program and have some idea of what they want their robot to do before it makes sense to build something. Maybe I need to completely disassemble our existing robot and have them rebuild it just to get some of that out of their system.

I think today I'll have one group focus on the dancing robot for the kindergarteners, and another group will focus on accomplishing one of the tasks from the Hydro Dynamics Challenge. I think they'll be excited if we do the toilet flushing one.

Tomorrow is the school STEM night, where several groups from the university will come over and do all kinds of fun STEM-related activities (plus pizza) to get kids excited about science. There will be a robotics club booth, where each team will take turns for about half hour apiece, just being there working on their robots. We don't present anything, just be there doing something and available for people to ask questions about what we're doing. Should be fun.