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.