A lot of excitement this week: MoonBots finalist announcement, excited kids working on MoonBots Phase II, the London Olympics, and Curiosity’s landing on Mars. On the latter, there is great coverage at NASA JPL site and Wired.com has an article on how to watch the Curiosity’s landing.
Godspeed Curiosity!
Team Captain went shopping at Home Depot to buy materials for MoonBots game board foundation. He and Matthew trimmed the 2 boards of foundation to size. The base is cut into 2 pieces for easy, flat transport of game board in the team minivan (with the back 2 seats removed).
Anthony and Matthew did some tests on hill grade on early prototype on our MoonBots robot. Calling our robot LunarScout unless we come up with something better. For testing, they looked around the house and decided on used school binders with rolled towels for the ramps and a cardboard box and heavy Wi Fit board for the high ridge section. The robot worked well on fairly steep slope after Matthew made modifications to wheels and tires. Robot needs some rework since too big to maneuver well and does not have the solar kit installed yet so more work is needed.
We designed our game and basic landscape during our Phase I meetings. Katie and Anthony showed their mission models from Lego Digital Designer at the meeting. Matthew demoed his built mission models. Team will work on changes as homework.
We have questions for the MoonBots contest expert before we finalize our landscape design. Our team captain sent email to the MoonBots contest team for clarifications.. Hopefully, we will have answers from contest expert so we finalize our landscape design.
The team had a regular team meeting scheduled for Saturday, Aug 4th, but after making the MoonBots finalist list, we couldn’t wait for Saturday. The team is at my house (Aug 2nd) working on a build of a rough terrain robot prototype for MoonBots Phase II. There is something Phineas and Ferb about the way the team is spending their summer.
“Ferb, I know what we are going to do today.” Phineas
2012 MoonBots announced the 30 finalists of Phase 1 of the 2012 MoonBots: A Google Lunar X PRIZE LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Challenge yesterday at 6pm.
Drum roll, please. It’s official per the MoonBots website — Model Scout Robotics was one of 30 youth teams worldwide to be named a Phase I finalist! We get to participate in Phase II. The team is all smiles and overjoyed.
Thank you to sponsors of the 2012 MoonBots program for the opportunity to participate in Phase II MoonBots. The team is getting ready to transform its designs into reality and show our community how fun and rewarding STEM can be for youth.
For Phase II we are planning a 6 foot by 6 foot lunar landscape with mission puzzles. We will then build and program a LEGO Mindstorms robot to cleverly solve the puzzles. The last part of the competition is sharing our project with youth in North Texas . It’s a lot of work and we’re excited to make our design a reality.