Lego Robotics Wrap-up

The fall 2013 session of Lego Robotics ended with a bang at the Bakken. The amount of growth seen in all the students was truly impressive - we can't wait to see what these future engineers might build next.

In the morning session, each pairing had two challenges. The first was to program their robot to complete a maze and end on a pressure switch that each of them made. This task is a great example of how looks can be deceiving - everyone thinks it's easy when the challenge is introduced, but it actually requires each group to use all the skills that they've learned together in a very precise manner. Nonetheless, the whole group did an awesome job battling through to the end! The pride they felt when their robots made it onto their switches for the first time was well deserved, and fun to watch!

The second challenge that each group showed to their families during the Big Show was one of their own choosing. We had several golf shot challenges, a rodeo robot, and even a very fine dance performed. The creativity and ingenuity showed here was trumped only by the persistence in seeing their ideas brought to life.

The afternoon group had a completely different set of challenges. Since this group is a little older, they got to decide as a group what the theme for their robots and challenges should be. After going through many ideas, like a relay race, sumo wrestling, construction site, and a robot dance party (dancing was very popular), the group eventually decided on Robot Olympics as our theme. Each builder came up with their own design for a robotic event, then designed and programmed the robots from scratch. The results were extremely cool. We had a bipedal discus throwing robot next to a quadrupedal cat robot that lit up our Olympic torch.

 

There was a soccer kicking robot and a hockey shooting bot. We even had a fishing robot that used magnets to catch the illusive paper-clipped mouth bass. The horseback riding robot required some very challenging programming to get both horizontal and lateral movement to mimic a horse. Not only were the parents impressed, I'm pretty sure that the kids impressed themselves.

Overall, it was another great session of robot building and programming that reinforced the idea that kids can make some amazing things with the right tools and an engineer's outlook.

Meet the Makers!

This last Saturday we hosted a special event for our young inventors, a Meet the Makers session. We like to to invite local scientists, designers, engineers, and artists who make to come in and share some of their creative energy with us. This week during our break between the morning and afternoon sessions we invited students and families from both sessions to join us and learn from Jerry Belich and George Werl.



George demonstrated for us the principles of Chromatic Electricity. He also demonstrated the importance of being able to show off your project. As a practiced magician George enjoys the flourish of a good presentation.

George has been a long-time friend of The Bakken, and is one of our longest running mentors for the Inventors Club. He has a background as an electrical engineer, primarily working on telecommunication equipment.

In this video, George shows how each colored light bulb is controlled by the switch of the same color. The really interesting thing though is that each switch controls the light bulb regardless of what socket the light bulb is in, even when you take the light bulb out of one socket and plug it into another one.


Jerry shared his Choosatron, an interactive fiction machine. He talked about the iterative design process, and the value of trying different things out and finding ways to improve your design. He brought some of the older versions of the Choosatron, and showed us how the project has evolved over time.

Since the older students have been learning how to use Arduinos, Jerry was kind enough to stick around with the afternoon group and get into some of the more technical details of how the Choosatron hardware and software work.

Jerry is an interactive storyteller, theremin player, inventor, and developer for Clockwork Active Media here in Minneapolis.  He just recently completed a successful kickstarter campaign for his invention.
 

Jerry will be back at The Bakken on November 9th during the Free Second Saturday to share the awesomeness that is his Choosatron with more people.  It is pretty neat, so you should come check it out.