04/27/10

We're on the home stretch! The competition is less than two weeks away, and the students are making fantastic progress. Their idea of a defensive robot as opposed to an offense one is an interesting idea. They have the basic frame built and hopefully by the end of this week will have the engine placement worked out so that they can begin test runs.

03/01/10

The topic for today's class was traction. The students were introduced to the concepts and mathematics involved in determining friction in consideration of weight. The students were having some trouble building the robot, so I build a piece of the "Protobot" to give them an idea of how to effectively use the provided tools. Hopefully they finish the robot by the end of next week so that we can start running time trials.

02/24/10

Today, we quickly went over different types of gears and how they work (ie idler vs sprocket and torque vs speed). I then gave the students the remaining time to work on the protobot.

02/22/10

To start off, I let them finish up the questions from our previous session. Afterwards, we discussed the motor subsystem of the VEX robot including functionality and possible issues that may arise. Following that I gave the students the remaining time to work on the protobot which, after two 30 min sessions, is about 10% complete.

02/10/10

Today, I did not have access to the robotics equipment (it was locked away somewhere) so the students and I spent some time doing book work. We talked about the basics of the "Engineering Design" process (ie taking a problem and devising solutions on paper

before building).

To simulate this I pretended to be a client hiring the group to build a robot. As the client I asked them to create a rough drawing of their robot, explain its functions and give me an estimated cost. After they completed this exercise, they worked individually answering questions about a hypothetical "room cleaing" robot.