New Teams

We had a great time last year, so much that we wanted to share it with other homeschoolers. We had more than 10 kids interested this year so we split into 2 teams The Master Control Programmers(MCP) and the kidz around the Block. Please take a look at their blogs, and facebook pages. MCP facebook page and kidz around the Block facebook page.

Competition

Competition was fantastic!! We had a blast! We had a very busy morning, but the afternoon was a slower.  There was 4 categories in which  competed; Teamwork, Technical, Presentation, and of course the robot game. The first round of the robot game we only got 35 points. The Second round we got 125 points, this tied us with 1st place!! We received 120 points in the 3rd round. Once everyone had competed we were in 5th place in the robot game; which we thought was really good for our first competition!   We won 1st place in the presentation category!!! This means we get to go to State!!!!

Our Robot: Brick

 Competition is tomorrow!!!We have been working really hard to get all of our missions programmed, and the robot built to perfection, we sure hope it is good because we have changed several times. Here are some pictures of Brick.



This is Brick with the pusher attachment.

 We use it for most of the missions.







This is Brick with the claw/syringe arm/bone bridge arm!!!
 I was surprised with how much stuff we crammed on to one motor!!!!















 



Powerpoint for the skit!!

Click on the link below to see the power point the doctor uses to illustrate answers to questions in the skit. https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d9q729z_0d7pn6bc2&revision=_latest&start=0&theme=blank&cwj=true

Emily's powerpoint about the eye!!

Please click on the link below to see a power point that Emily made on the eye.

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=0AccGYcsgDfHRZDlxNzI5el8xN2RmaHhqYnZw&hl=en

NXT-G Move Blocks

Well I am back and ready to tell you about move blocks.

This is what the move block looks like when it is in the workspace. Pretty simple but we have to be able to tell it exactly what we want it to do. So then we go down to this bar across the bottom.

With this panel we can tell it which port we want it to move(there are 3 ports we can hook motors to, B & C are default for wheels), which direction we want the motor to move, how much power, how long we want it to move(we can change this to degrees, seconds, rotations or unlimited) and if we want it to coast into the next action or brake immediately(this is mostly for if the next action is stop). You'll notice I left the steering out, we haven't figured this part out and decided that it is easier to just select one wheel and tell in how many degrees to go.

We mostly use degrees to tell the robot how far to go because it is the most precise way to measure. The robot has a program on it that we can use to measure rotations or degrees.

Programming with the NXT-G language

The language we use to program the robot is called NXT-G. It is not a text-based language. To program the robot that we also have to design and build we drag and drop blocks into the workspace. Some of the blocks include: move blocks, wait blocks, sound blocks, display blocks, loop blocks and switch blocks. I will give you an explanation of each block in future posts.