FLL Kickoff

 Three Wake Robotics FLL teams got together for the FLL season kickoff!! All summer long, we studied about Natural Disasters to get ready for Natures Fury. Everybody was excited that kickoff and the beginning of the season were finally here!!!

At the kickoff, everyone ate lunch together and did fun team building activities outside! Then, it was finally time to watch the videos.  One video explained the missions for the robot and the other explained the project challenge for the season. We were glad to finally find out what Nature's Fury means. After the videos we broke into groups and started working on building the LEGO mission models for the robot table. I think that this table is going to be the funnest one yet! Our YAM (young adult mentor) agrees and he's been doing FLL for a long time.

Here is a link to the YouTube video that explains the robot game for this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5xj0FUSPY&feature=youtu.be

and this link will tell you all about the upcoming season!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrfKwW71xYs

Color Maze NXT 2.0

Here's an updated version of my Color Maze NXT. I drew the maze and used color foam to give people the chance to move them around and tell the robot how to get through the maze.

I'm a member of a group called Wake Robotics that does a lot of outreaches to get people interested in engineering and science. I'm hoping to show this robot at an outreach and give people a chance to "program" the robot by placing the colors on the maze and telling the robot where to go.

Happy Mothers Day Mom!:)

I got this hilarious card for my Mom on Mothers day! It says this:
    
        
What a mom says:
"clean up your room please". 

What a kid hears:
"I want you to mope around all day,
move a few things around, 
and complain about how hard you have to work". 


I saw a lot of other cards, but not quite right.
When I saw this card, that all changed! I knew this one was perfect the moment I read it!:)    

The Geography Fair

The Geography Fair is a time when home schoolers gather information about different countries and put it up on a tri-fold board and bring it to a big room where other people can look at them. I did my project on Iceland. I learned a lot! I think that one cool thing about Iceland is that it is on two tectonic plates that are pulling apart. Every time the plates pull apart magma fills the gap, which results in Iceland growing at a rate of about one inch per year!

I really enjoyed walking around and seeing everyone's projects. These are some of my favorite displays:

There was also a fun activity where the older kids got a list of questions about the countries. If you wanted to win a prize, you needed to find the answers on the displays. The younger kids got a passport. They went around to the displays and got stamps to win a prize. I helped my little brother get his passport stamped. We both got really cool inflatable globes!

Fun at Fine Arts Festival!!!

Last night I went to a home school Fine Arts Festival. This is a time when kids (and professional artists!) show their art to other home schoolers. Fine Arts Festival was in a big gym, so there was a lot of art enjoy! There where all kinds of art. Music, sculptures, sketches, paintings, and lots more.

I brought a sculpture that I made in my art class with Mrs. Brunner. Her class is really fun! (the link is for her website)  I constructed the sculpture out of newspaper, tape, and strips of plaster. It's a self sculpture that looks like me pitching a baseball. It was really hard to get the leg up off of the ground, and I had to put in a Popsicle stick splint to keep it up!  It was exciting to have my sculpture on display, but I was also a little bit nervous!

My little brother also participated. Here is a picture of his art.

One of the professional artists was really good at sketching. He was drawing people that came up to the table. He drew very quickly and was able to capture a face in just a few quick marks. Here is one of the sketches he made of me. I really like how he can easily put cool armor on and make it look real!

I'm really hoping that I can take one of his classes!  He has two blogs. One is CartoonSketching and the other is RobotNinjaMonsters.

I am going to participate next year!!!


                           

Please HELP Team PyroTech!!!!!

I have learned a lot from my mentors from Team PyroTech.  They are heading to the World Competition. You can read more about that in one of my previous posts. They have set up a fundraising campaign to help with the expenses. Please help them go to World. You can click on the link to see their fundraising page.

this is a picture of the fundraising 

page the link will take you to:

Every little bit helps!

You aren't only supporting the team... you are supporting all of the people they help too, like ME! :)

Color Maze NXT

This was a difficult program to write, but very fun! I had been playing around with the idea of a music sequencer that I found at Damien Kee's website. (Go check out the video, then come back!) I didn't want to take my robot apart to build his sequencer (yet!) because I'm using it to practice programming. So I made the sequencer so that it would drive over the colors instead of rotating over them.  It didn't work as well as I hoped, so I was thinking about other things to do with the color sensing program.

I decided to make a course for it to use colors to find it's way from start to finish.  I wanted it to use blue to turn right and red to turn left.  I had trouble getting it to turn accurately though. My batteries were low and that made still more problems. I made turns more accurate by stopping before the turns and turning more slowly.  That helped a lot! -and now it's working great!!!

I am hoping to take the robot to our next outreach and let people draw red and blue squares to help the robot through a course. I think this will give people a basic idea of what it's like to write a program.

Here is video of my robot doing the color course:

Pennies away!

I absolutely love collecting coins! Did you know that a coin collector is called a numismatist? Look it up.

One of my neighbors got me started and I've loved collecting them ever since. I store them in a big black binder, called the Coin Collector's Album. A great place to get coin collecting supplies is BCW Supplies.

Recently the same neighbor, Butch, gave me an Indian head penny. Some people think that the "Indian" is really Venus, but no one knows for sure. The history of the Indian head is really interesting. I learned about mine at www.coinsite.com.

I'd love to know what you collect. Please leave a comment below.

   
                                                                                      

The season begins......

The baseball season has just begun again, so I'm a little bit worried because I haven't practiced in a while. But, I'm willing to give it my best shot! I'll keep you updated on this season.

Lego Ball

Look I'm famous!!!

I'm really excited to be on this blog!!! 

I was so surprised to see myself on the front page of The NXT Step. I've been reading this blog and watching videos on it for a while and it is amazing what people can do with the NXT! One of my favorite videos was posted recently. It is of an amazing NXT lathe!

FRC Team Pyrotech Wins 2nd Highest Award

My FLL team, Cloud 9, is sponsored by Wake Robotics. So is PyroTech, an FRC team. Our teams see each other a lot because we meet in the same place. In fact, some team members of PyroTech mentored our team! So, I was really excited about going to go cheer them on at Regional qualifier! Their robot was really cool. It had to shoot Frisbees and climb. The competition name is ultimate ascent. Watch this video to see how it works. 

Everybody was standing in front of me so I didn't get a bunch of great pictures.

The team won the second highest award called Engineering Inspiration.  I got to help in some of the outreach activities that their team did. I think that the outreach things are a good part of FIRST because you get to practice public speaking and you get to show everybody about what robotics and engineering is like. Doing outreach with an older and experienced team helps newer teams out because it helps them see what to do and gives the newer team someone to look up to.

The team is going to the World competition in Saint Louis in April.  They are looking for donations to help for traveling to Saint Louis. Please help PyroTech go to World!!! Go to the Wake Robotics website and click donate. PyroTech is AMAZING! If you want to know more about team PyroTech watch this video.

They are also selling cool LED lightbulbs and necklaces made from the actual robot from last year.

Sopwith Camel Bought With Birthday MONEY

I've been wanting the Sopwith Camel Lego Set  for a looooooooonnnnnnnngggggg time.  After my birthday I had enough money to buy it. A huge thanks to all my family!

(WARNING if you build this set always support the front of the plane when picking it up!)


It was extremely fun to build but really hard. It was hard because of the steering mechanism which used a lot of ropes.

Here are a few pictures before it broke in half. I'm planning to take the whole thing apart and rebuild it.

victorious Chewbacca!

Book Club - Homework Machine

I go to a Book Club at my library. The most recent book I read in Book Club was The Homework Machine written by Dan Gutman. I thought it was a really cool book because people with very different personalities become friends because of the homework machine.

During book club we all built a catapult because in the book the friends get in trouble, so they catapult Belch, the homework machine, into the Grand canyon!!!


 

  

City Hawk

My Dad and I went to the Titanic Exhibit at the downtown science museum not too long ago.  We saw a hawk fly out from a hole in a tree. We were really surprised.  We also heard "cheep-cheep" sounds that sounded like baby birds. I took a picture of it when it landed on a lamp post not far away.

Penguin

Sorry that I haven't posted in so long. This post is about a penguin that I made out of very few pieces. I might post instructions for him later. If you are interested leave me a comment. I have two versions. One with glasses (actually binoculars) who I call Professor Penguin. The other is the one with a hat. I  call him Adventure Penguin.

Santa bot

Santa bot was definitely my hardest NXT build so far. The arms were the hardest part.  I added a loop to the program so Santa bot would move forward, see somebody and open his basket. I put candy in the basket and when the person took candy out the SantaBot would say "HoHoHO Merry Christmas & Happy New Year" then he would back up and start over. I brought it to my family at Christmas and everyone enjoyed it a lot!I also brought it to the science fair to show everybody. I made a  YouTube video that shows how he works. 

I got the instructions to build it from an awesome blog called MP's NXT Universe. You can find the instructions to build your own under the NXT Robots category. He named it NXTolaus. Make sure you also check out the video of his NXT Gatling Gun! It is amazing.

Cloud 9 at FLL State Competition - slow start - great ending!

Wow! Going to the FLL State Competition was amazing. It was really exciting that our team made it this far!  There were 60 teams in the gym. It was really cool to be able to see the pits and competition tables at the same time.

Our team had all the interviews and presentations first thing in the morning. We had our best Project skit ever!  The interview after the skit was really great. We talked about all of the research we did and answered questions really well. The core value interview went better than most. It wasn’t a shouting match which sometimes happens. Strategies we came up with since the last completion really helped. Robot interview went not so great. (even worse than that) We weren’t prepared to explain why we brought two robots in.  We had some missions on one robot and others on the other. The judges only wanted to see the competition robot but the missions they wanted to see weren’t on that one.

After our interviews we had some free time. We all had a great time button trading during the free time. We walked around and talked to other teams and saw their solutions. Then we headed down to the competition tables and did our robot runs. It was a disaster! Even worse than our robot design judging. We had to rescue it more times than I can remember and it flipped over multiple times. 

Instead of letting the robot part get us down, we had a ton of fun!!! Coach Fiona and Y.A.M. Clark helped us get this far and kept us going.

At the end of the day we were surprised to get the Research Award. The trophy was surprisingly made completely out of technic pieces! It turned out we had an advantage by talking about all of our research in the interview earlier in the day.I got hoisted up with the trophy for some pictures.

Clark also won a trophy for best young adult mentor. Our team was really happy that he got a trophy too.





pictures coming soon.....

FLL

I am part of an FLL team called cloud nine. Check out our website. It tells you all about what we have done.
We have competed in two competitions. At the first competition we won a trophy, then continued  to regionals,the second competition. Now we are goeng to the State competition, third level.

There are a couple of videos on YouTube of our NXT robot and attachments in action. I built the one way gate to retrieve the chair and the dog. It wasn't the best attachment because it wasn't all that accurate and pretty slow. It was still fun to build and I think one way gates are cool.

       
At the competition most teams have their own team button. one of my favorite parts of competition is to trade them.

Book Review #1

I have a bunch of old mystery books from the Hardy Boys series. I started with some of my Dad's old books and then I started looking for them at a used book store. I've probably read 25 or so.  My favorite of the series so far is The House on the Cliff. It is the second book in the series. The link will take you to the Wikipedia page.



It is really exciting and was the first one that I read. At first I thought it was really scary and I put it down and didn't read it for almost a year. I just read it again and thought it was really exciting. If you like exciting mystery books I highly recommend this one!

Let me know what you think if you read it!

happy new year!

This is my first post. I love to build with Legos and read books.  I also love to share what I read and build.   I am excited to start this blog and the new year!

I hope you enjoy my blog.