Rain, rain, rain! The students did great today and we managed to avoid the downpours throughout the day. Friday is always and exciting and sad day. So excited that we had such a great week and sad that this is the last day.
The red and blue groups got to dive more into the engineering world today with Dr. Bruce Walcott. They built and tested their Archimedes boats, did some human robot programming, did a tour of the engineering quad, and did some programming challenges with the Ozobots. As a final project today in robotics, they got to create their own launchers and catapults. I’m sure you’re not surprised when I saw they thoroughly enjoyed using the engineering design process to design, build and test their robot builds.
The yellow and green groups got to do some investigations with a hot product developed by Dr. Scott Stephens and his team. The lab-on-a-chip is a result of his research and their hard work during entrepreneurial leave. In robotics they concluded their week of programming by working on the First Lego League challenges. Students were really excited to put together their sequence of code and see how their robot responded. The students really grew this week in their robotics and coding knowledge!
In Vex Robotics, they took their code they built together yesterday and their robots and did a competition today. Teams could earn points by moving the balls and blocks in the field – they were timed and had another team competing against them. Team 1 was the eventual winner! We are exploring the idea of adding a 2nd week so the students can dive deeper into programming the Robot in C and trying out more design engineering aspects of the robots and the competitions.
Conversation Starters…
Red/Blue Groups
- What did you get your Ozobot to do today? How did you make your Ozobot go?
- Is there a type of engineering that interests you?
- What did you build today in robotics? How did you test it out?
- Did you change your robot design? Why did you think to do that?
- What was your favorite part of the week? What do you want to learn more about?
Yellow/Green Groups
- What is a lab-on-a-chip?
- Why are they useful and important?
- What investigation did you conduct with your lab-on-a-chip?
- What challenge(s) did you complete with your robot today? What sensors or motors did you use?
- What was your favorite part of the week? What do you want to learn more about?
Vex Robotics
- Did your robot perform like you thought it would today in the competition?
- How did you score points in the competition?
- If you could rebuilt your robot, what would you do differently?
- What was your favorite part of the week? What do you want to learn more about?
Photo of the Day…
Click on the picture and it will take you to all the pictures from the week. If there is one you would like taken down, please let us know and we’ll take it down.
