What a fun season- congratulations Cooler 4 U!
|
Oregon FLL State ChampionshipWe had a great day at the state tournament. While we didn't win any awards, we had strong performances in all four areas of the competition: Research Presentation, Robot Design, Core Values and the Robot Game. We were 11th of 55 teams in the Robot performance scoring a high of 140 points! It's been a fun season! Congratulations Adaya, Ahmed, Leonie, Julian, Adam, Declan, Elias and Gilbert. We look forward to next year!
|
Our best run of the season!
Preparing for StateWe have been busy preparing for the state tournament. The team decided to add the toilet to the tripod mission. That will give us the potential of 20 more points for a maximum of 195. We also decided to build a prototype of the water cooler for our research project. Thank you Chris!
We came back from winter break a little rusty so we've been trying to get our groove back on the board. Even still, we are managing to get at least 150 consistently. We decided we need over 200 baubles- that's a lot of baubles We were lucky that Angie offered to help us! We are also trying to remember our lines for both the presentation and the robot design statement. Good thing we have another week! We are all very excited to be going to state! |
|
Cooler 4 U is going to state!!!!
What a day it was! Cooler 4 U had strong performances in all four areas: Research Presentation, Core Values, Robot Design and Robot Performance. They won two awards: the Rising Star award (for young or rookie teams who show promise for the future) and the Robot Performance award (for scoring the highest points in the robot runs). They are invited to compete in the Oregon State Championship in January! Congratulations!!!
Week 11: running the board. We need to shave 30 seconds but we are sure we can do it. We just get better and better!
Weeks 10 & 11: November 20, 2017
|
These were two high pressure weeks for us but the team pulled together and got a lot done! We chose our t-shirt design and color, we chose a team cheer and we decided on a team bauble. We met with Chris one last time to discuss where to put the special glass and to test our design for the filling height. Then we finalized the script and put together most of the presentation boards- thank you Shelly and Rudy for all their hard work in making that happen! Now we need to memorize our lines.
We cleaned up our programs, began using just one robot and worked on running the board. We were able to complete a successful run in 3 minutes- now we need to shave off 30 seconds- we we can do that! We are getting better working with our partners. It's not easy to add the attachments, get the right program and make sure you have an accurate setup while the time is ticking. We have two more practices to pull it all together - we will! |
Week Nine: Cooler 4 U running the board.
Week Nine: 11/8/17
We had another busy week. We worked on our teamwork with Shelly on Wednesday. We had to wrap gifts with our hands connected. It was a fun challenge. We are getting better at working together.
We discuss options for t-shirt designs and ideas for baubles that we can hand out at the tournament. We voted to put this core value on our shirts: "What we discover is more important than what we win." We all agreed that we loved the hats that Adam found! Later we worked with Rudy to recap our research and to brainstorm ways to present our information in just 5 minutes. We decided we wanted to do a skit and that we'd like to wear some kind of simple production designer costumes. We also talked about water bottle options for our water cooler design. We could go on modifying the design forever! Last but not least, we programmed, built awesome jigs and attachments and eliminated two of our underperforming robots. We decided the order we'd like to run our missions and practiced running the board. It was stressful but super fun! We keep thinking of ways to speed up our programs, our arm switching and our teammate changes. There's a lot to consider! |
|
|
Week Eight: November 1, 2017This week was chock full of awesomeness!
Rudy helped us test the water at school. We were glad to discover that one of the new fixtures does not appear to have lead- whew! We had two product designers come to visit: Chris and Rob. Both shared how they approach designing a product. We realized that we have done a pretty good job in our process. They gave us great feedback on our water cooler design. We did a field trip to ZGF Architects. What a fun experience. Laurie Keenan gave us a tour and explained how architects approach design. She encouraged us to look in different places (art, music, nature, etc.) to look for design inspirations. We especially enjoyed looking at the glass samples and trying to decide which would be best for our cooler. We continue to make progress with the mission challenges. We now have the pump, the water filter, the fountain, the tripod and the pipe removal working almost all the time. We are very close to getting the pump extension and the rain working, too. And last but not least, we now have a team name! We are Cooler for U! Go team! |
Week Seven: October 24, 2017This team just get better and better!
We chose several more missions to tackle and are well on our way to completing them. We added two color sensors and a touch sensor to our robot so that we have more tools to use in our programming. We are also having fun designing attachments. We shared our water cooler designs with our teammates on Wednesday and decided on all the features we wanted to include in our team design. We had a good conversation about what was important to keep or get rid of, what was expensive and what was practical. We know the design will continue to evolve but we have a great starting design. Shelly came to do a teamwork challenge with us. She gave us some good advice about how to work together and how to approach a team challenge. She thought we did a great job working together. |
|
|
Week Six: October 17, 2017What a fun week! We chose four missions to start with. Two of them are already working! That's 50 points! We added two color sensors to the robot and will add at least a touch sensor next week. We talked about adding a front panel so that we can add and remove attachments quickly.
The other big news is that we finally chose our research project. We have decided to design a water cooler for kids. The water coolers that we have at school are dreadfully inadequate. We are sure that we can design something that is much better. We realized that we only have 8 practices left- oh my! Suddenly, we feel a great sense of urgency! |
30 points!
|
20 points!
|
Week Five: October 11, 2017It really feels like things are in full swing. We are so close to choosing a research topic. Rudy helped us to better understand why we have a lead issue at Hayhurst, what the costs have been and what is unique about the element of lead. We brainstormed about problems in Hayhurst that are connected to the lead issue. Next week we will choose the problem and begin focusing on our solution.
Our team robot is beginning to take shape. We added the arms (two large motors) yesterday. We discussed how the arms are used and how other attachments can be easily added to and removed from the robot. Next week we will add the sensors. We chose three missions to focus on: the rain, the fountain and the filter. We also agreed on other missions that we'd like to do. This will help us to know what sensors we'll need and where they should be located on the robot. We worked with our engineer partners to begin programming missions. That was fun! |
|
|
Week Four: October 4, 2017
We made two big decisions this week! The first major decision we made was choosing the team robot. Before we chose, we had one last chance to modify our robots. We tested the robots by downloading a simple program onto them. We were interested in how straight they ran and how well they turned. We ran all of the robots on the board and voted on the one we wanted for our team. It was a difficult decision because any one of the four would have worked well. Everyone was a good sport and in the end, we all felt good about the one we chose. Then we began building three more to match the winning design.
Next we presented our research pitches. We spent a lot of time listening and asking questions and discussing what we should do for our project. In the end, we decided to focus on lead in the water. It's an important issue to us. We are hopeful that we will learn why there's lead in Hayhurst's water. Then we plan to solve one problem related to that. We just need to figure out what problem we want to solve..... |
Week Three: September 27, 2017We worked hard this week! We were glad that Rudy returned to keep us going on our research project. We talked a little more about what we mean by "find, use, transport and dispose of water" and we reminded ourselves that the project has to be connected to humans. Next week we will make pitches to our teammates on topics we think would be good research projects.
Next we worked with partners to become mission experts. We presented the missions to our teammates and placed post-its with point values on each mission. Then we talked about what missions we think we should do. We considered how many points they are worth and how close to, or how far away from, base they are. We realized that some of the missions are much more difficult to get to and some aren't worth the effort for the the points. Then we discussed design features we wanted our robot to have. We each worked with a partner to design and build a robot. We were surprised at how difficult it is to attach motors and to get your robot balanced. By the end of Thursday's practice, we had four robots built! |
|
|
Week Two: September 20, 2017The team was determined to get the models completed this week. We almost made it! Thank you to Angie and Chris for helping us with the water treatment model! It's been fun to see what all the models look like and to learn about how they work. It's a colorful and fun board but we think it may be difficult to navigate our robot on. It will be a fun challenge for us.
We watched the mission videos on Thursday so that we can begin talking about our board strategy next week. Once we do that, we can begin designing our robot. We are extending our research by reading water related articles at DogoNews. We missed Rudy this week and are all hoping that he heals soon. All of us are getting to know each other better and beginning to really feel like a team. Go Hayhurst Lego Robotics team! |
Week One: September 13, 2017At last the season begins!!!
We had a great first week. We started by creating a team contract. We brainstormed about what behaviors make a team work well. Everyone contributed and everyone signed the contract. We hung the contract over our challenge board to remind us of what we agreed upon. We met our research coach, Rudy Baum, and began talking about HydroDynamics and what it means. Rudy challenged us to think about how we interact with water every day. We learned that each day we have opening and closing jobs and that we'll be working with different engineering partners. We were excited that we finally got to start building the mission models. We have to be careful to build everything exactly as the instructions define because our models need to match the ones at the tournament. These models have a lot of moving parts which we think is way cool. It's fun to see the board come to life! |
|