Madison Park Trip

Last Thursday, October 29th, I took some team members to Madison Park Elementary school for their High School Night. It was a recruiting trip to find new member for the robotics team and to promote the Marine Science program at Carl Hayden. I saw some colleagues from Camelback High School. They just started an engineering magnet program. The are using Vex robots. They aren't doing FRC this year, but they hope to get it going again next year. They were interested in doing NURC. I spoke with a counselor from Fairfax, my kid's home school, and I didn't know they had an engineering magnet. I was jealous of the kids at EVIT, they have their own 3-d printer. And their 3-d graphics program is really cool. The 8th grade kids are so young. They get younger every year. Except for the boys that hassled Elizabeth, we enjoyed our trip.

Rail Fair

We spent Saturday and Sunday, October 9th and 10th, at the Scottsdale Rail Fair. They have a new building and are construction several more model rail road tracks. We spent some time talking to the model rail road club members about how they build the tracks. Most of the tracks were about half build, so it was really cool to see what goes in to making them - usually you just look finished product and have no idea what goes into making it.

I was happy that my parents, wife, kids, brother, sister, and several nieces and nephews got to meet the team. My father was particularly impressed with Martin.

I spoke with a gentleman for 20 minutes on Saturday. His family tired of waiting for him and just left him. We discussed robotics, technology, and education. Then he told me he was the chief information officer for Fender (the guitar company). I was impressed!

The team must have talked to several hundred people over the weekend. I received many positive comments about the team members.

Special kudos goes to Maria how was kind to a person who was having a bad day.

My Lego Team

I have an FLL team assembled at my daughter's school! We have collected enough money to cover the entry fee, we just have to get the school to issue the purchase order and we are in the competition. This has to be done asap or else we will not be in this year's competition. I have been working on this since last May and getting the school's people to do "one more thing" has been difficult. I am hoping we get the team established this year and then next year will be easier. Being a teacher myself, I understand that it can be hard to volunteer for another project.

It was weird to be at an elementary school. This kids are so small. I work in a high school and I am used to students that are approximately my size.

CopperCon 30

We all had a good time at CopperCon although it was very hot. There was a club there that all they do is build robots from the Starwars movies. They had three R2D2's! We took a picture with our robot Heather and R2D2. We talked with them for a while. Apparently George Lucus likes what they do, since he gave them the sound files for the Star Wars robots. I think Eddy convinced them to try omni wheels on their next project.

There was a "Women in Science" discussion panel. I don't think the team wanted to go, but I made them. The first lady was a chemistry teacher at Glendale Community college and the second lady was an astronomer from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico (trivia fact - I used to live about 10 miles from that observatory). The adults talked about their road through college and into the workforce. They basically said everything Ledge says about hard work and education. The team was very respectful, but it wasn't the first time they had heard that speech.

I think Josh won the award for most tax credit pamphlets handed out. Good job.

CNC

I found a website that shows how to make a CNC mill. Check it out at: http://buildyourcnc.com/default.aspx

Having a machine that could build custom parts would be very helpful. But, it is a big project. Let me know if you are interested.

NURC

NURC was awesome! I worked really hard. I didn't get much sleep. I really enjoyed it.

Seeing all the different designs inspired me. I wanted to start building my own rov right then.

During the course setup for NURC I noticed that the pool camera bases were a pain to get placed correctly. I had the thought that next year we could build four low cost rov's and stick them in the four corners of the pool. We could get better video of the missions if the cameras were mounted on an rov instead of a stationary mount. Connect some thrusters and a camera to a frame and the battery could remain on land. We shall see.

5/7/10

Today Is my first time blogging