Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Since everyone was done with their chassis, today was mainly programming. Groups began trying to get their first task. I saw a group get pretty close to completing the nano-wire challenge, but I think they need to rethink their approach.
Since the NXT group only had one mechanical person there, I decided to work with them. We wrote out a basic logarithm for the nanotip challenge, and then went to the computer to program. We did a little tutorial for the program. After we were a little familiar with it, we began progamming the robot for the challenge. A beautiful thing about the NXT is that it has built in encoders inside the motors, so we just had to find out how many revolutions the robot would take to get to the nanotip, and then how much to turn. We were able to pop up the tip in one try, and then we simply reversed everything to get the robot back. The built in encoders make it so much easier to program. We were able to write out the program in one try.
I'm a little disappointed that there was a lot of kids missing today. I know it's Halloween, but I don't like the lack of commitment. I'm irritated that there was only one builder for the NXT group, and I only counted thirteen kids that signed in today. Hopefully tomorrow there'll be more kids. I'm going to work more with the NXT kids, because (and I know this may sound unfair) I think that they have a lot of potential to do really good with their robot. We were able to program a fifty point challenge in four minutes, so I think that it should be pretty easy to do everything else. I also think that they have a pretty good researcher.
I also think that the kids aren't in the right mindframe. They aren't thinking in steps, like go forward five seconds, turn right one second, etc. Maybe tomorrow we'll take about programming and how logarithms for robots works.

- Kyle Norquist