Teacher Training in Pasco with the Puget Sound Center

Last week I was in Pasco, WA training 7 people on our Lego Robots curriculum for the Puget Sound Center for Teaching Learning and Technology. Their TechREACH program increases middle school students' interest in STEM. They put on two-week summer camps every year, with past themes including creating video games and computer animation. During the two-day training, we covered the technical aspects of robots (constuction, sensors, programming) but also lessons we've learned in teaching robots (trouble-shooting, peer learning, etc). The teachers all had a great time and built some really cool robots. One of the groups had a very impressive slow-driving robot, while another built a very consistent and effective basketbot. The teachers were so excited about building their robots that they didn't even want to break for lunch. During the next several weeks, these teachers will teach 6 camps in Washington state.

Help us secure a grant & grow!

We're looking for someone to help with researching and writing grants, so that we can expand as an organization! If you're interested in helping us, check out the volunteer position info here: http://www.idealist.org/if/i/en/av/VolunteerOpportunity/172180-231/c ... and get in touch with us! Hope to hear from you!

TAF Robot Olympics Final Event

On this beautiful Saturday morning, approximately 100 people gathered in the gym of the Southwest Boys and Girls Club near White Center to watch the championships of the Robot Olympics. TAF has been using TL's curricula in its after-school programs for a year in 6 different schools in the Seattle Area: White Center Heights, Mount View, Beverly Park, Hill Top, Southern Heights, and Seattle. Each of these schools had teams for 4 exciting events: basketbot, tug-of-war, drag racing, and archery. It was a pretty intense day of coopertition (cooperation + competition) with a different school winning each event. First up was the tug-of-war, where the winning strategy was to build a robot that was "heavy and had gears" in the words of the winning team. Their robot featured a low-geared three motor robot that bested each of its opponents fairly easily. Next up was basketbot, where the robots had to shoot a ping-pong ball into a box. There was a 1 point line and farther away was a 3-point line. Every group was able to score some baskets, but the winning team shot an incredible 100% from the floor, rapid-fire shooting one-point shot after one-point shot, a total of more than 20 in only 60 seconds. The sleeper event of the day was the archery contest. We weren't expecting this event to be the most exciting, but it really drew the crowd in. This event featured a bulls-eye target laid on the ground. In preparing for the event, each team had to calibrate their robot by calculating how far it would go. They did this by either measuring speed and then programming their robot to drive for a particular time, or by measuring the circumference of the wheels and programming the robot to drive a given number of rotations. The exact distance between the start line and the center of the bulls-eye was kept secret until just before the competition. Once it was announced, each team huddled around the laptop and did the calculations to program their robot to drive as close to the target as they could get. It was pretty amazing to see young people furiously doing math on a Saturday morning. Although every team was pretty successful, the winning team nailed the bulls-eye on both attempts. The final event, the drag race was of course also exciting, with the winning team offering up a well-geared car that blew everyone away. In the end, all the students did a great job, and Hill Top took home top honors.
All in all, it was a great event, with lots of support from parents, and the students showed off their impressive math and robotics skills.

New Horizons in Search

It seems like everybody is talking about wolframalpha, an amazing new search engine that tries to infer your meaning from your question and “make the world’s information computable.” You can do some really neat things with wolframalpha like compare GDPs of different countries, calculate probabilities, track weather, stocks and lots more. 

Try some of these fun searches:

• Enter your birthday – mine’s February 24th 1981
  
• Try a math equation – try x^2 sin(x)
  
• Type in your city – Try Seattle or New York or even one like “Vancouver” that’s in a lot of different places, it’ll automatically pick the one that it thinks you mean.
  
• Type in a really, really big number like 49 tredecillion
  
• How far are you away from Tokyo? Type in Seattle to Tokyo
  

Another really neat search engine is called TinEye. Tineye matches images together! You can search for an image that you upload, or paste in a URL and Tineye will try to find images that are similar. Try it with your own images or check out the “Cool Searches” Page.

Build a Rubber Band Powered Racecar

We just posted a new activity guide! Follow the steps to create a rubber band powered LEGO car! We used the NXT kits to build ours, but if you have some LEGOs with wheels and axels you should be able to modify our designs easily to start racing your cars. Remember, using your imagination and engineering skills is the name of the game. Race against your friends and try for the farthest distance for fastest car.

As you come up with new designs post comments and design tips.

Check out the new activity guide on the resources page, or download it directly.

TechStart Partnership

I'm excited to announce that we've started a great partnership with TechStart. They're using our Mars Rover and Robot Zoo activity guides. If you're interested in a partnership, please contact us at partner@technicallylearning.org

From the TechStart blog:

TechStart students in our robotics classes learn to design, build, and program robots using the Lego® Mindstorm™ system. In the Fall of the 2008-2009 school year, they learned about the Mars Rover and created their own robots related to the field of astronomy. In the Winter session, they studied biology and created a robot zoo, complete with plants, animals, and, well, some interesting creatures from the depths of their imaginations. Check out the video above for a look at the sled dogs one student was able to make in just a few short hours. Our robotics curriculum is provided by Technically Learning, a partner nonprofit dedicated to providing hands on science, technology, engineering, and math learning activities and resources to teachers and students.

New Robot Olympics Activity Guide Posted

I’m excited to say we’ve just finished and posted the, Robot Olympics, Activity Guide! This activity guide helps students understand math while keeping them interested by building robots to complete Olympic events and competing against each other. This teaches the principles of mathematics like: perimeters, estimation, speed and distance calculations, randomization, statistics, and ratios while training kids to think and build their robots iteratively. Iterative design is a principle of good engineering and science and shows that sometimes it’s worth it to return to your last design and apply newly concepts to build an even better robot.

Take a look at the new activity guide on the Resources Page and please let us know what you think in the comments.