Our MoonBots Phase I finalist prizes arrived today! We received a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robotics kit to add to our collection, 4 Google Lunar X MoonBots 2012 t-shirts, a $150 Visa gift card, a Dexter Industries solar power kit for our Mindstorms robot, 25 Lego gray base plates, a set of four 48mm Lego compatible Rotacaster robot wheels, 10 Lego keychains and brochures to share. We will use our prizes to build our MoonBots Phase II contest challenge entry.
The wait is over…..Curiosity has landed successfully on Mars.
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.
We have 2 new team members. Walter is a Webelos II scout in Pack 1113. He’s on Matthew’s Select soccer team, loves building LEGO projects, is an awesome long distance runner and is a regional science fair winner. Veronica is his sister. She is also a Select soccer player, a great Lego builder and a district science fair winner.
It’s too late to have Walter and Veronica join the MoonBots build, but they are officially on our First Lego League team roster.
Welcome to the team Walter and Veronica!
The whole Model Scout Robotics family (scouts, parents and and coaches) had fun at Moon Day at Frontiers of Flight Museum on July 21st. I’ll post photos and video when I get them from parents.
Moon Day is a local event that celebrates the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon on July 20, 1969. Model Scout Robotics ran the Circle 10 Boy Scout booth and our team’s booth — we were busy! The scouts took several breaks from our booth to visit other booths and take part in the youth activities. Each team member got a Lunar Sample Bag from the museum staff with lots of space related goodies. (The team van now sports a NASA sticker. )
At our booth, the scouts shared their adventures and successes as a North Texas student robotics team. Showed other kids and adults some of our team NXT Lego Mindstorm creations. The younger kids loved watching us rerun our First Lego League 2011 robot, ScoutBot, doing the challenges. The older kids liked running our tele-operated robots(claw, forklift) . We were simulating control on Earth of 2 robots on the Moon. Our coach controlled his NXT robot on the museum floor via bluebooth using Android phone app.
Our team mom was busy too – publicizing the new BSA STEM Nova awards that encourage youth to explore STEM subjects in the boy scout program and the First Lego League robotics program open to youth teams age 10 to 14 in North Texas.
Matthew got interviewed for a story on local youth robotics.
The team parents’ ran the booth part of the time so scouts could tour the other booths at Moon Day and attend a couple of classes on Moon research and making artificial moon dust. Matthew and Anthony got to touch a real moon rock.
The museum put all of the robot groups in the same floor area, so it was easy to talk shop with the other teams. We visited with the other FIRST LEGO League team at the event, Iron Reign of Dallas. They were at the Dallas Personal Robotics Groups booth. They brought the Moonbots 2011 landscape and their robot.
Our booth was between to the Dallas Mars Society and Dallas Personal Robotics Group. It was cool that the Dallas Area Rocketry club was across the aisle from us too.
Dallas Mars Society brought their Mars Curiosity rover model and their Mars landscape. They gave us tips on making a moonscape inexpensively. We liked their rover’s camera system — wireless, full color display and the small camera can run on 9volt battery. It is a Lorex LW1001. Our coach is buying our team one of these cameras. It might come in handy for Moonbots Phase II.
It was quite a day. We provided community service to Circle 10 and the community, got a team field trip, practiced our speaking and presentation skills to get ready for upcoming FLL season and got some great tips that will help us in Moonbots Phase II, if we make the finals.
Model Scouts submitted their entry for Phase I of the MoonBots 2012 competition. Luckily, Moonbots gave teams a three day extension; we used the time to polish up our video a bit. We also had to make some minor changes after we reviewed the long official rules with our video.
The script, storyboard, lego model and team member video clips on green screen was easy for us. We watched many video clips on JPL and NASA to find the best ones for our video. The video filming of the Phase I to Phase 4 robotic lunar base on green screen was more of a challenge. The lunar base time sequence filming was a bit harder. The blueprint was created with Photoshop on a still of the lunar base.
The hardest part for us was finding the right music. Luckily we found Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech Music after doing a Google search for “creative commons instrumental music”. We wanted to use Star Trek music but our team sponsor was concerned about publishing a video with copyrighted music or copyrighted non-government funded groups (like NASA, JPL, ESA) photos or video clips on You Tube.
We used OpenShot Video Editor for our project. It runs on Linux operating system and was FREE. Our team captain recommended it. Our team sponsor arranged a donation to them on our behalf after we successfully used it on this project.
We also used Adobe Photoshop (educational license) on Windows for special effect work.