Cool Science Festival

Last Saturday we participated in the Cool Science Festival at UCCS. I think it's getting more crowded at this festival. The Gazette reported that there were 7,000 attendees this year. That's a big jump. I brought along a couple of Mindstorms to do Spin Art with the kids and the FTC team build a terrific Rube Goldberg ball contraption. They had spent over 50 man hours on this and could have spent even more. Thank goodness for deadlines!

Here's a video of the contraption.

Staring intently at the ball machine. "Where can I buy that kit?"

The ball machine always needs some fixing or tweaking.

Maybe he'll go home and try building one of his own.

Spin art was a hit. We spun over 400 masterpieces.

FIRST Tech Challenge Season #1

Learning about the Engineering Lifecycle.

After three years involvement with the FLL program, we are moving up the ladder to FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge). This is a program for kids in about the 7th grade through 12th grades. It's a completely different animal. I'm not coaching this year, but I get a great view of all the action since I'm there a lot. The boys (yes, this year all boys) are really young engineers in training. They have more responsibilities and maturity. We started out our first meeting with the Engineering Lifecycle. Whew! It was great having one of the coaches as a systems engineer. If the boys don't win anything this season, it will have been worth it for them to learn what engineers do in the real world.

So having a brand new team requires money. Everything from buying a robot to shirts to program software. We are trying to raise $4,000 this year. The boys are doing a camp to advertise the FIRST programs, raise some money and work with kids who are interested in LEGOs and robotics. They will be at the Briargate YMCA leading 3 different stations for kids to get their hands on some cool LEGO technologies. Theses are not your typical LEGO sets found in the stores. They'll be working with LEGO WeDo, LEGO Simple Machines and Mechanisms and Mindstorms Robotics.

FINALLY... If you work for or know of a company that donates to STEM education, please contact us. We QUALIFY for 501(C)3 nonprofit donations.

Camp Info

When: Saturday September 14, 2013

When: 9am - 12noon or 1pm-4pm

Where: Briargate YMCA

How Much: $30 in advance or $35 at the door

Contact for Questions: Esther Lee (719) 271-2120 or ftc7104@gmail.com

Please come out and support our team! 

Download flyer.

Download registration form.

Teacher Training at Tufts

This past week I traveled to Tufts University Center for Engineering Education Outreach to attend a teacher training workshop on LEGO MIndstorms. It was so valuable to learn how others were using their technology in the classrooms. Although I’m not really a classroom teacher, I picked up some great ideas for how to organize, manage and run different exercises.  I really admire those teachers on the “front lines” of teaching in the schools. Many had come after receiving Mindstorms kits at the end of last school year and being told that’s what they were going to teach next fall. Just like that they had to learn a whole new system and they were happy to do it.

 

We basically played with LEGOs all week and got a chance to see the new EV3 machine and software. I admit I was so busy picking up on the old stuff: Mindstorms NXT-G, WeDo, Scratch and Labview that I didn’t have any time to really play with the EV3. The facilitator was excited about the new stuff, so I’m sure it will be in my future.

Here’s what I learned:

1. How to run more exercises that would appeal to girls by a)  Avoiding direct winner take all contest b)  De-emphasizing cars c) Competing against a standard instead of each other d) Holding exhibitions instead of contests
2. Having more open ended play time will allow the kids to design and discover their own creations.
3. Washing LEGOs in the washing machine is possible if you put them in a mesh bag. 
4. Have a battery charging station. Wow! You have to see it to believe it how quickly we all go through batteries. With the station, students can take care of changing batteries without having to ask you.
5. Working with WeDo and Scratch together is easy to do. You can teach more programming techniques and Scratch is free. Currently the only version that works with WeDo is Scratch 1.4. The 2.0 version should be ready for WeDo by the end of this summer.
6.  I picked up some great exercises from our teacher, Barbara Bratzel and her book Physics by Design is a terrific resource. She’s working on the next version for EV3 too!

Teachers hard at work and play.
Lining up for our slow robot race.

Our exercise in gearing down.
This was the snail race so we decorated appropriately.

I'm trying to sweep all the LEGOs off the mat in 30 seconds.

Oracle Tour of Robotics Lab

Our tour group at Oracle

One of the advantages with being involved with FIRST Lego League is sometimes you get access to people and companies that help you understand how technology/robotics is applied in the real world. The team and I got a chance to see how robots are used in helping companies store data. Our tour host warned us that this is not the type of robots you see in Star Wars like R2-D2. Although the robots we saw were not as glamourous as the movies, they were real workhorses.

I tell students that robots do the for "D" word jobs: Dirty, Dull, Dangerous and Difficult. I would generally categorize the job these robots performed as helping humans out of doing something Dull.

The robot's primary job is to retrieve tape cartridges and put them in hard drive to read and write data. Companies from all over the world will

A view of the Library with the kids hearing about how it works.

need access to these tape cartridges at some point. For some, it's to maintain backups. For others it might be to maintain data offsite. For whatever reason, when the user on the other end of the long line of cables requests information from the tape library, the robot finds the correct tape cartridge and inserts it into the tape reader which then sends or receives the data back to or from the user. The library was huge! One tape could house 5 terabytes of information and each library contained 10,000 tapes.

They used to have humans do this job of finding the right tape and inserting it into the drive. It was done by people on roller-skates. Here's even a short article on how IBM saved labor costs.

It takes mechanical, electrical and software engineers working
together to build this robot.

The kids were very interested in seeing how the robot performed its tasks. They learned that for every automation, there is a backup to keep the robot from failing. Weather it be in the software, the bar codes, the sensors or even the electrical supply, the designer has to think of all the possibilities for failure. With our Mindstorms NXT, we tried to do some, but we didn't do enough to maintain 100% consistent results. It's nice to know things fail in the real world too, but that there's a ton of hard work to keep that from happening.

The exposure that the kids got to the working environment, the people and the technology was invaluable. They don't have to wonder how math or science or engineering plays into the "real" world. They got a chance to see how they could be a part of engineering things in the future that might make life easier for the rest of us.

Click on the link to see the robot hard at work.

Camps in Pueblo, CO

I'm based out of Colorado Springs, but this summer I've got a special opportunity to run two camps at The Sangre de Cristo Arts Center:: Buell Children's Museum in Pueblo, Colorado. If you know any family or friends who love to build with LEGO bricks and participate in a summer camp in Pueblo,  please tell them of this new opportunity near them. This is separate from the normal way you'd sign up for my camps in Colorado Springs. You need to sign up directly through the museum here. 

I'll be offering two camp sessions:


Building & Programming using LEGO Bricks - WeDo 
July 15-19, 9am-12pm
Cost: $115
Ages 6-9

This is the same camp I offer on my website. Click here for more detailed description.

Engineering Using LEGO Bricks

July 15-19, 1pm - 4pm
Cost: $115
Ages 8-13

This is the same camp I offer on my website. Click here for more detailed description.

How Many Ways Can You Build A Duck?

This past weekend, I attended a LEGO Symposium. It was what I expected - a way of exposing teachers (potential customers) to the whole spectrum of LEGO products that can be used for teaching STEM in the schools. We briefly dipped our toes into the LEGO WeDo, Mindstorms and Tetrix systems. I was so glad to have already worked with WeDo and Mindstorms, otherwise, it might have been too overwhelming.

Anywhere I go, I tend to find good ideas. One of the best from that day had to do with the introductory remarks. As we signed in, we were all handed the same plastic packet of six LEGO pieces. There was a combination of red and yellow pieces. Just another pile of LEGOs to add to my already growing pile at home I thought. During the opening remarks, we were told to open our little packet of LEGOs and build a duck. OK I can do that, where's the instructions? Wait, there's no instructions? How do I do that? The LEGO rep said we could build whatever type of duck we wanted. Wow! What a great way to introduce the concepts of creativity and individual solutions to the same problem. I loved it! Everybody in the room made their own type of duck and they were all uniquely and wonderfully made!

Start with these six pieces. You must use them all to build your duck.

A single duck is built.

So much you can do with only 6 pieces!

So, who out there wants to figure out the math problem that calculates the number of combinations you can make when you have 6 LEGO pieces?

Using LEGOs as a Substitute Musubi Maker

We were stuck in a bind the other day. What to do? I promised to make Spam Musubi for a potluck on Monday. I had all the ingredients and already made the rice. I went searching through the kitchen for my handy dandy gadget that you need in order to make Spam Musubi. I hadn't used it in probably over 5 years. I could find the top part of the maker, but not the rectangular mold. Here's what it's supposed to look like:

So one of the kids yelled out, "Make it out of LEGOs!" They thought they were just joking. However, I took it very seriously and made the other kid build me a mold out of LEGO pieces. We completely wrapped the substitute Musubi mold in Saran wrap so as to keep everything food safe and started on our way to making some great food!

Saran wrapped the entire mold.

There's the top part of my musubi maker that I could locate.

Seaweed, rice and spam makes a perfect combo!

The Trophy Dilemma

This year we won 3 trophies!

At the end of every season we have won trophies, I have been unsure as to how to "share" the season's prize. The first year, I rotated the trophy between homes for about a year. That was a logistical nightmare. Also, it ended up coming back to us broken. The second year, I just held onto the trophy. Nobody seemed to complain. This year, my third year, we decided to build our own trophies for each of the kids. This was also a difficult task, but I'm more satisfied with the results.

We built a mock up trophy that matched the big one we got at state. Then I went to Bricklink.com to buy the pieces from as few sellers as possible to save on the shipping and handling. Also, I stayed in the US so I didn't have to pay extra for postage. If you aren't familiar with Bricklink, it's like an eBay for LEGO pieces only. It's a wonderful resource that I've used for years to get replacement parts.

State trophy on the left. Our homemade one on the right.
Ours is 6.5" tall.

The toughest part was getting the pieces correctly counted and figuring out exactly which colors I wanted. My first choice was a yellow trophy, but since they don't make as many yellow pieces, the prices were higher and I would have had to go to more sellers. In order to make this somewhat cost effective, I had to stick with the somewhat boring color of "light bluish gray" for the trophy. If you are making just one, maybe you can find more fun colors. I had to make 6.

We made the trophy base big enough to include a metal plate that we stuck on there with double sided tape. I went to a local trophy store and ordered some plates. We put all the accomplishments for the season for the kids. Also, we got the logos for Senior Solutions and FIRST on the plate (in color).

The cost was somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 for each trophy including the cost of the plate. I had the families help pay for some of that cost. If you are interested in making your own trophy, I've recorded the parts and taken photos of the steps involved. We tried making this in LEGO Digital Designer, but there is a step in the end where you need to use a little elbow grease with this build and basically FORCE a few pieces together. LDD doesn't like that.

For complete instructions you may download this pdf.

FLL Mindstorms Maniacs ColoradoFIRST State Competition - 2nd Place Champions

Temperamental table rounds are the most nerve-racking.

Wow what a year it has been for our FIRST LEGO League team! Gratefully, it isn't over yet! Our team competed in The Colorado State Championship a few weeks ago and we won the 2nd Place Champions Award! We really appreciated being recognized for all our hard work. It went well during the day so the kids should have been proud whatever they got if anything so it was quite a surprise when they read off our team. All throughout the naming of the prizes, we thought we had a chance at the project awards. When our team got passed up and there were only three trophies left to give out, most all of us had resigned ourselves that we wouldn't come away with any prizes.

The kids did well all the way through. Here's the blurb that was read before the team got called up:

Champs Award #2

Impress the judges with what you know!

This team had exceptional research and presentation, professionalism, and motivation. They solved a multitude of problems for seniors by going above and beyond the expectations. They show great potential for their futures and stood out in their battery testing and clever pop-out brick. The 2^nd place Champion’s Award goes to team #1023, the Mindstorm Maniacs

Well done Maniacs!

Next, we are on the waitlist to attend the Invitational Open Championship at LEGOLAND in Carlsbad, CA in May.

Registration is OPEN for Spring Break 2013 Camps

If you are thinking about what to do with your kids during the upcoming Spring Break, consider registering them for a LEGO camp. It's happening from March 25th - 29th. You may choose either morning or afternoon sessions. This break, I'll just be offering the LEGO ENGINEERING camps. We're meeting at the Springs Rhythm Dance and Event Center again. It's got a wide open hard floor space where the kids move freely as they have their competitions.

For more info, click here.

If you want an idea of what that camp looks like, here are some highlights in the following video.