Music and Memory

Briana L - Green Machine Researcher - 6th Grade

The Green Machine researchers have come up with a topic for our research project.  We went through a lot of ideas that didn’t quite work out, but we came to our final idea last practice!  We have known from the beginning of the season that we wanted to do something to help Alzheimer's patients.  Our idea is to design a piano keyboard attachment for a motorized wheelchair. The attachment would be removable for when you don’t want to play the piano.  We chose to do the piano attachment because when people have Alzheimer’s, music is one of the last things that they remember.  The piano is a way for an Alzheimer's patient to use music to reconnect with their fading memories.  We have already started our script which takes a lot of thought.  I can’t wait until we are finished with everything and ready to present!

Robots in Triplicate

Darius K. - OwlBot Programmer - 7th Grade

For the past month or so, the OwlBot programmers have split up into 3 groups of 2 programmers to come up with, design, and build a robot that they see would perform the best in the competition. Each team also created some demo programs to show the capibilities of their robot. Last week all the programmers had a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of each robot. We decided to go with Winston and my robot. A variety of things influenced the decision.  First, our robot had a square frame, meaning it can align itself with the walls of the compitition table. Also, our robot heavily uses sensors to  keep track of where it is on the table. The other option is to use odometry, which counts rotations of the wheels to go a certain distance. When you initially start your robot, if you use odometry, there is a very small margin for error. If you use sensors, the robot can easily align itself with fixed points on the table.

After we chose the robot we will use for the rest of the season, we still have 3 sub-teams of programmers programming different missions. This week our team built the 3 robots each sub-team needs to program. We had to built our robot to exacting standards derived from the original robot. Everything from the size of beams and axles to the location of all the wiring had to be exactly the same as the original robot to avoid distinctions which can affect preformance. With multiple people programming on the same robot design, programming will be more efficient throughout the season.

Design Competition

Jonah B. - OwlBot Programmer - Grade 8

Until today the OwlBots have been divided into 3 groups of programmers.  Each "mini team" built their own robot and programmed a few missions for their robot to complete.  Today all three robots were thoroughly reviewed and judged on their performance.  Two of the three robots performed very well.  Winston's and Darius' robot was sensor based and focused on the harder missions, while Anthony's and JD's robot was rotation based and did the easier missions. Both robots had many pros and cons, but in the end we decided to go with Winston and Darius' robot with some of Anthony and JD's attachments, thus making the new robot capable of both easy and hard missions.

From there we proceeded to dissasemble the old robots and start copying the new one, so that we could have multiple copies of it for backup and so people could work on different missions at the same time. We are now unifying our efforts and moving towards the same idea. We now look towards the competition with more confidence, because we are that much closer to our goal of building a winning robot.