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.