Today, Matt Hudson, Matt Korpela, Nicholas Esler, Nicole Becchetti, and I helped the local Upward Bound with their Lego Robotics and Iron Range Engineering tour day. We started the day off by setting up the course that the high school students had to conquer. It was a large rectangular shaped area with five plastic balls slightly bigger than golf balls and much lighter. They were evenly spaced from the corners with one in the center. The students had the choice of using motion, sound, color, touch, and line sensors in the robot's program. The initial construction for the robots was the same for every group, but after it was functional they were allowed to add any additions to their robot. There were four groups of five to six students, which I thought was a little too large for a team. With teams that large, it is really hard to assign every member a significant part to the competition. Most teams had one to two members that lacked in participation, but they all appeared to have fun. The winning model was slightly dissapointing to me. The robot had a long horizontal plow-type arm across the front of it, that simply drove straight forward to remove all of the balls in 4.8 seconds. My favorite robot had a basket-shaped plow approximately five inches in width (compared to Team SKUDD's four ft. arm) that would drive straight through the balls, walk them to the edge of the contest area, and then turn and charge towards the next ball. Unfortunately, it took them 29.4 seconds, which was not fast enough to beat Team SKUDD's simple solution robot. After the robotics challenge, we showed the students around IRE and explained our program to them. I had a great time volunteering today, and I'm know the rest feel the same way!
Proofread by: Austin Mekash and Matt Korpola
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