During our robot unit we are doing a lot of things. We did a track for the robot . We also made the robot to go around a milk bottle. That was confussing. We also had to make the robot to go in a straight line then stop on the line and it had to beep. I really enjoyed drawing the track. Also making the robots do stuff. I also enjoyed programming.

Unfortunately, the eight year old half of the Red Alien Monkeys were away sick so there were only two lots of hands working today. Two girls from another group were left without their older buddies so they worked with us for the day. Despite this, we still got a reasonable amount done on our mapping and programming for the robot.  A successful forest floor plan has been drawn so now we are attempting to upscale the drawing to a six by six area-A3 paper. Currently, when programming the robot, we are trying to master rescue programming which means getting the robot  to follow a black line.  Previously, members of our group have managed this but we have found that just because the robot did it once, it doesn't mean it's simple to get the robot to do it again.

Finally, at the last minute, the robot did follow a fairly straight line and next time our goal is to get our robot to follow a wonky line and stay on track.  Hopefully, our group will be all well and ready to get to work next week!

The 12 year old half of the Red Alien Monkeys

Challenges start to kick in

Today was a successful session for us, most of the time. We biked to BS and made our start on planning our forest floor, after lots of discussion we had a idea of what we had in mind to create a Hansel and Gretel floor map but weave in a bit of adventure as well. Birds, tunnels, ponds and bridges are all apart of our design. This was our longest session yet and we wanted it to be productive. After morning tea we got down to using the Robots. Our first task was to show the Year fours how to use the NXT Mindstorm software for a simple task, to get the robot to move up to a line and stop we were successful. And then we were told that we had to get our robot to go around two milk bottles, sounds easy enough, well that wasn't the end of it. We had to get the robot to do a figure eight around them. This was the hardest task yet, we were hard at work testing, when we were in the last stages of programming our time ran out and it was time to have a quick lunch and leave. All and all, we learnt a lot of new things about the NXT Mindstorms software and it will help us a lot along the way.

Practice makes Perfect

During Rm 2's robot time in class, we had a programming break through.  After many attempts we finally managed to get our robot to follow the black line that was drawn on two connected sheets of A3 paper.  This was very exciting for us and we are getting more and more confident with the programming software.

The twelve year old half or the Red Alien Monkeys