We have four priorities right now.
1. Lego Robotics Summer Camp
We have our 5 Lego Mindstorms NXT kits that are loaned to us by FRC#2587 the Discobots and their non-profit organization Mentor Search. We are working on organizing the kits into containers so they will be easy to build with. We also are working on figuring out the curriculum and will be developing that further.
Some of the camp details
We will be running a two week long camp at the Spring Branch Family Development Center Boys and Girls Club. This camp will include 4 sessions of 16 students each. The camps will give the students a good idea of several engineering concepts focusing on sensor and programming development of the NXT robots.. Each student will have approximately 15 total hours of class time. We will also have roughly 8 team members at the camp each day so we can have a lot of one on one interaction with the students. The camp will be held June 11th-22nd.
2. Helping Start New Teams
This is a project that will be on going for a very long time. Our goal is to grow robotics programs at more Houston schools. Our main focus is on First Lego League because there are a huge number of elementary schools and the resources that you have to devote to an FLL team is much smaller than a larger high school program.
We are also hoping to grow VEX teams in high schools that may become a FRC teams in future years. We want to make sure that any FRC team that we help start will be sustained for many years.
If anyone has interest in starting a robotics team in Houston (or the surrounding area) please contact us or if you would just like us to come demo our robot and talk about engineering we would be happy to do that as well.
3. Improving our Robot for Texas Robot Roundup
We have several students who are working on changing several access of the robot to improve it before we compete at Texas Robot Roundup on July 28th.
Our biggest priority is to make our shooter consistent. We learned a lot form teams at Championship and we have several plans for improvements. Including changing our software, our hood design and our conveyor system.
4. End of Year Party
We discussed more of our end of year party plans today.
We decided that we will be having our social on May 29th.
Paintball will be on May 31st.
Those are the main things we are working on right now, we have a few other summer projects but those are moving along a lot slower right now.
Engineering Links of the Week
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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/iron-giant/8886/ - http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/machines.html
– Spectrum
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra
