May 4th Meeting Notes

New Build

This week we had the boys spend some time building a new robot.  Up until now they have been using the 5-minute bot.  This bot is a fairly quick build and is good for learning some basics.

We wanted the boys to try out some different robot constructions to get a feel for what makes the different designs good or bad.

They started out by doing some quick searching for images of bots they could build.  They found a picture of a bot that was called the "golf bot".

It had several sensors on it as well as a little putter for moving balls around.  We couldn't find instructions for it right away, so they started by trying to figure out how to build it themselves.
 

I found a book we had on the NXT and it happened to have instructions in it for building a tri-bot, which looks like the basic form of the golf-bot.  They compared the instructions to what they were building.

Their conclusion was that the instructions in the book were much more complicated, but would make a much sturdier robot.  So, they started following the instructions from the book.  They still have a little bit of building left to do before they have a completed tri-bot.

Turning

At the end of the meeting, not all of the boys were busy building the robot, so we took a little bit of time to talk about turning.  We explained how the robot turns.

The NXT does not turn like a car does...it turns by turning the wheels at different speeds, or even different directions.  We talked about the different values they can use to get different effects and talked a little about the math behind determining how many rotations they would need in order to get the robot to turn around a certain sized circle.

Next Meeting

Reminder, there will be no meeting on May 11th as that is Mother's Day.

On May 18th we will have the boys finish building the tri-bot and will talk a little more about the math behind turning.