Underwater Robots! Pizza!

As you might know, ASIJ has been hosting a visiting scholar, Dr. Robin Bradbeer, in order to advance the robotics program.  A specialist in the field of underwater robotics, Dr. Bradbeer is working mainly with Don Chambers and the Robotics program in the high school, but also took the time to share her expertise with students in Invent and Engineering in the MS, as well as 6th grade science. This past Monday, students from I&E got the chance to test drive one of the large underwater robots made in the HS as well as a small kit robot - exactly the type that I&E will start working on this week. Not only was it cool for the students to maneuver the robots, but we managed to get a pizza party out of the deal, as well. Yes!!!
(Video done on Videospin; music from freeplaymusic.com)

What did we learn?

Success #4

This project was the second in 7th period, with Henry, Kenji and Allen. Again, the task for this one was to open a lock, which turned out to be quite hard, given the amount of force needed to pull the locking bar out of the lock casing. After dozens of tries, we improvised to have a mysterious force appear out of the ether and provide a little timely assistance. Think of it as the 7th grade version of Maradona's Hand of God goal. Nice work, fellas.

7th period, group 1 - persistence pays off!

Project from T-Jax and Milla. Didn't quite happen the way they drew it up, but the mission (to open a lock) was a success. I don't know if it is obvious from the video, but the girls made a replica of a school locker complete with handle, and then set the lock so that it would fully open when pulled. This was a very hard task, given the amount of force needed to pull the lock apart, but eventually they got it to work. Sorry for the bad camera work in this one - I didn't quite do it justice.

Success #2! Good part starts at 0:22

Team of Yume, Joel, and Chris. After many, many tries, it worked! Again, task was to get a golf ball in a cup. This was a real team effort, as Thomas, Grant and Steven also helped to get everything set up and working correctly.