Built On The Rock at World Fest

Alright, I know this is really late - it's taken a while to get back to normal after all the excitement of FLL. Anyway, Built On The Rock had a great time at the World Festival this year! Since this was our first time being there, it was a really exciting experience. As Jim posted about earlier, we won 1st Place Robot Performance and 1st Place Innovative Robot.

As some of you may have seen already, I put up a NXTLog of our robot, which you can see here. Now that the competition's over, you can also see a video of our robot in action on our website, here. The video was taken before our state competition in December. Since then, we made improvements to all the missions, so we'll also be putting up a video of one of our competition rounds at the WF on our Press and Videos section soon.

Below are various pictures of the action at the World Festival:

Dean Kamen speaking at the opening ceremonies... we had front row seats!

Our team pit. The police uniform and lab coat are made from nanofabric - grape juice, water, and other highly-stainable substances simply bead up and roll right off this amazing material! This was the subject of our research project for the competition.

Setting up for one of our rounds, and one of our technical judges posing for the picture. :-)

An interesting picture one of the team parents got right after our robot achieved a third perfect score. :P

Posing with the Mindstorm Troopers after both of our teams got perfect scores in all three rounds... the four fingers we're holding up represents our scores of 400.

And as always, you can find out more about the team at: http://www.TeamBuiltOnTheRock.org

-Jonathan

Celebrating 25 Years of MINDSTORMS

In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS, we take a trip through history. Please also visit ROBOTMAK3RS Community every week as we highlight different projects all through 2023 in celebration of the anniversary. Some of the early history is based on the content shared by Coder Shah in our MINDSTORMS EV3 Community Group . Some of the text and links may have been edited from his original posts for consistency and clarity. 1984 - Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen watched a TV program called "Talking Turtle," where MIT professor Seymour Papert demonstrated how children could control robot "turtles" using LOGO, a programming language he developed. 1988 - The collaboration between MIT and LEGO resulted in LEGO TC Logo in 1988, which allowed students to control LEGO models using computer commands. The video shows Papert demonstrating TC Logo. 1990 - LEGO TC Logo was hampered since the robots you built had to be tethered to a personal computer. LEGO and MIT...

ROBOTMAK3RS Review: LEGO River Steamboat

I thought the LEGO River Steamboat would be an interesting set for a ROBOTMAK3R review for a few reasons. First, the LEGO designer of the model is Marina Stampoli, a long-time collaborator of the late ROBOTMAK3R Vassilis Chryssanthakopoulo s. From earlier collaborations with Vassilis, I knew Marina was incredibly talented, with an eye for aesthetics and functionality. Her background in architecture is particularly useful for her relatively new position at LEGO. Her other sets include the Magic of Disney (21352), Message Board (41839), and Red London Telephone Box (21347). Second, watching Marina's reveal video and reading her designer interview made this set even more tempting to build. The gearing mechanisms running through the model gave way to many opportunities for automation using LEGO robotics elements. Since ROBOTMAK3RS is all about adding interactivity and automation to LEGO brick, I thought it would be fun to see where and how LEGO robotics could be added to this s...

Celebrating MINDSTORMS with a Remix - Part 3

The ROBOTMAK3RS continued their celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS through these Fall and Winter remix projects. Each ROBOTMAK3R was tasked with selecting one LEGO set of their choice and combining it with a MINDSTORMS set. Below are the five amazing models they came up with. Braill3 by Jerry Nicholls Braill3 is an EV3-based LEGO Braille bricks reader. This robot uses its fingertip, made from three touch switches, to read messages written using the LEGO Braille bricks and will speak out what it detected. If it sees a simple maths problem it will attempt to solve it and give the answer as well. To learn more about the process of creating this machine, read Jerry's blog . Braill3 can be viewed here . Set Review: The Braille Bricks set is well thought out. The ratios of the letters is suitable for general use and the addition of some punctuation and arithmetic operators is excellent. There is a card showing what bricks there are and their quantities, but no form of sort...

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