Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Day 3 Review

Greetings!  Another fun day at tech camp.

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!





















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