May 18th Meeting

From the Coaches

We are starting to have the kids take on a little more responsibility, so from now on, we will have a section that is written by the kids.  Each kid will take turns writing what they learned and we will post it as part of the blog.

I will try not to edit the section from the kids too much (perhaps fixing some grammar or spelling and punctuation).  Any parts that I felt were important, and the kids did not mention, I will try to add to the "From the Coaches" section.

We had the kids learn about how the robot turns and how to calculate how much to rotate the wheels to get the robot to turn how they want it (you can read more about this in the "From the kids" section).

We also listed out the set of tasks that we have to complete for the competition.  I have added this as another page you can see to the right in the menu.

From the kids

Last meeting we finished building the tri-bot and learned more about turning. We learned how to calculate how many rotations it takes to do a full circle. We also learned which wheels turn with different turns.

Then we listed out tasks we need to do for the competition.

It was very complicated to calculate how many rotations it takes to do a full circle. When the robot pivoted only one wheel turned. When the wheels turned opposite directions it made a bigger circle. We figured out the bigger the wheel the bigger the circle.

The size of the wheel also plays a role in the calculation of how many rotations it takes to do a full circle. If the wheel is bigger it takes fewer rotations to make a full circle.