Ben, Sam, and I hope your child enjoyed our Lego+Minecraft camp. It was a great opportunity for us to spend extended time on fun projects that we just don't have the time to do during the regular school year when we meet for 35 minutes per week.
It is our hope to provide more technology camps in the future. Ideas for camps include game design/programming, movie making (shooting, editing, publishing), stop motion animation, 3D design and printing and perhaps some smartphone application development using MIT's App Inventor. If you have any suggestions for camps we certainly want to hear them. You can leave comments on this post or email me at mark.richardson@ih.k12.oh.us.
We finished the camp almost a week ago and I have finally found some time to upload the final set of videos.
Genetic Awesomeness Cargo Challenge
Minecrafters Cargo Challenge
Boss Brainiacs and the Orchard Challenge
And finally the excitement of Minecraft. Harry recorded a video of the class Minecraft session on Thursday. The video was a little too close to the screen so the picture was blurry but I have included a few minutes of audio so you can hear how excited everyone is.
We started the camp like we usually do with means robotics programming. The students continue to learn more of the programming blocks. Most the students were introduced to tank steering day which allows you to program the large motors which control the wheels of the wheel to move independently with both different power settings and even directions. Programming your robot to move one wheel forward and the other wheel backwards gives the robot the ability to make very sharp and precise turns which are needed for some of the challenges.
Today in Minecraft the campers had some free play time to apply what they learned yesterday with skins and MODs. In addition, Ben and Sam (with help from Brian) were able to run a Hunger games session as well as a session of the Wall.
We started the day continuing our Lego Robotics pursuits. Students continued to plug away at the various driving and steering challenges before moving on to the various sensors. It won't be long until groups start working on the touch sensor and ultrasonic sensor.
It is hard to take pics/vids at the same time we are trying to support our learners so we borrowed a trick used at wedding receptions. We put 3 digital cameras out in the lab for the kids to use and take pics and vids of their progress as well as the progress of other teams.
One group completes the Sensabot challenge. The robot is
programmed to drive an exact distance and then raise its arm to
simulate an inspection. The robot then lowers its arm and
drives to two more inspection areas.
In the DizzyDrill mini-challenge the robot has to be able to
navigate around an object without knocking it down. This skill
leads to the bigger challenge which simulates a robot
driving up and down the rows of a citrus farm without
running over the trees.
Minecraft was a little bumpy today. We thought we had a good idea to break the Minecraft sessions down into small groups of students and ran into some server performance issues. After class we rebooted both servers we are using for the camp so we can give it another go tomorrow.
The students did learn how to change their Minecraft skins (the appearance of their character) as well as how to install MODs on their local machine. One of the great things about Minecraft is that is allows other people to program and add on to the game. The popular MOD of the day was the Superhero MOD. This MOD allows students to play the role of various superheroes while playing Minecraft meaning their Minecraft character looks like the superhero they choose and of course they get all of the superhero powers within the game. The steps they took at school today should work exactly the same at home if they want to give it a go on their home machine.
Thursday we are looking forward to more Minecraft games and of course more robotics challenges!
