Forest Edge Elementary Fall Robotics Club

Well we kicked off the fall club yesterday afternoon. It lasted 2.5 hours. We had 30 kids show up. I’d say the hardest part was setting up the tables and chairs and spreading out the laptops and LME NXT kits. We had 10 LME kits built earlier from our two summer sessions. I added two additional LME boxes out of our remaining stock and spread the 12 sets across 6 tables. It took time ( about 40 minutes) because I was only expecting 24, not 30 kids.

Once all the kids were assigned kits (mostly the same ones that they used in the summer) they were told to proceed where they left off with the Robot Educator. I actually thought I could run the club with more structure but there were just too many students (even with five other parents there to help me set up).

Still, it was amazing how easy it was for the kids to just follow the tutorials at their own pace.
A sixth grade girl even reached step 20 where a robot identifies a red ball and subsequently whacks it with a golf swing. We had an interesting group of sixth grade boys who decided to deviate from the Robot Educator and build a fairly elaborate robot with a long crane attachment. The good news is that we were able to keep the sets apart, and pack up relatively fast. The bad news… no time for pictures.

More bad news: My website provider sent me an email the night before the meeting saying:
“We disabled your website because of a disallowed java framework. – Have a nice day.”

So now I’m looking for a good Java Servlet hosting company that can monitor my memory use (which was not out of the ordinary) rather then merely censoring my use of third party frameworks. (This framework is called Hibernate and it’s used as an O/R mapping tool to generate SQL and is not known to be memory intensive).

Long story short: RestonRobotics.org is temporarily offline until I can find it a new home.

-david

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 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...

Ghostbusters R.T.V Remix

Nino Guba is from Torrance, California, USA. He played with LEGO as a kid, but growing up in the Philippines, it wasn’t something he had easy access to. He only got reintroduced to LEGO when he moved to the US and had kids of his own. When his sons were younger, they received LEGO sets as gifts, but as they grew older, the sets got put into storage as their interest faded. Fast forward a few years, he started coming up with his own product ideas and thought about how he could quickly prototype them. That’s when he discovered LEGO MINDSTORMS—and was hooked! He raided his kids’ old collection, got everything organized, and now he's designing and building his own creations, blending his coding skills with LEGO robotics to bring ideas to life. Tell us about your Ghostbusters Remote Trap Vehicle (R.T.V) project. This project is a LEGO Technic adaptation of the Ghostbusters R.T.V.—a ghost trap converted into a remote-controlled vehicle. Its companion build is a prop replica of the Futaba...

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