Legos, Notebooks, and other Details.

    We had a great second meeting with the kids today!  Over the weekend, we realized that there are no FTC events located within 100 miles of New Orleans for the rest of this calendar year, so we have decided to add an FLL (First Lego League) team to our roster.  This way, our middle-school kids who are just starting out will be able to get a feel for robotics using a medium they are already familiar with - Legos!  Also, they will get some experience creating an "Engineering Notebook," documenting their design and build processes.  Finally, they will have an event to look forward to and prepare for - that we will be able to get to easily and with little expense.

    The Louisiana Regional Championships for First Lego League are at Holy Cross in December, so we will have some time to get our team ready and still be able to compete.  Meanwhile, our FRC team will be somewhat idle until January of 2015, because they are not allowed to start building the robot for the Spring season before then.  Our current plan is to have our younger students work on FLL projects during the fall, while our middle kids work on FTC under the guidance of "veteran" FRC members.  Hopefully we aren't spreading ourselves too thin with this plan.

    One exciting component of the FLL challenge that I learned about this weekend, is that the Lego robots will not be controlled remotely at all during the course of the challenge.  Our students will have to program all of the robot's functions through a course of up to 20 different tasks!  This makes the Lego League a good stepping-stone for the Tech and Robot Challenges, because it gives our students plenty of experience programming for the autonomous segments of future challenges.

    One last thing I'm pleased with in our group of new recruits is the enthusiasm they showed for getting started on the Engineering Notebook.  I understand from other mentors that getting the notebook complete is often like pulling teeth .  I hope this enthusiasm persists!

First Meeting

  
    After a few hiccups, we finally had our first meeting today.  The FRC teacher was out today, so I had both her kids and my own.  We probably would have combined our sections today anyway, however, as our plan was to have the "veterans" of FRC in past years speak about their experiences to the new recruits.

    The FRC students talked a bit about their first year in a robotics club, then answered some questions from the new students.  Then, we showed the FTC kickoff videos, and a few more of the FTC and FLL videos that are available on the USFirst.org website.  The new recruits got a bit more excited, and we began to brainstorm ideas for the design of our robot.  We discussed advantages and disadvantages to different methods of having the robot pick up the balls and delivering them to the scoring areas, and each student made a quick sketch of what they thought our first robot would look like.

    We're all looking forward to getting together again on Monday...

Recruiting for the Team

    I spent this past week recruiting for our FTC team.  We already have an FRC (First Robotics Challenge) team at our school, which in our case caters to the older students; so, although I am an 11th and 12th grade math teacher, I am recruiting students from the 7th - 9th grades.  My initial visits to the middle school classrooms yielded a list of about 40 students who said they were interested.  However, it was too much to expect them to pick up the application for the after-school program from the front office, fill it out, and return it to the school with $15.00 and a parent's signature.  A few days later, I made another trip to their classes to personally place applications in the hands of interested students.  Then, I made another trip and showed a video of some FTC clubs in action, giving out more applications to students whose interest was rekindled.  Finally, I made calls home to some of the most likely candidates.
    I will find out how successful my recruiting drive worked on Monday, as that will be our official first meeting (Wednesday night of last week was canceled because of a previously scheduled "Back to School Night" for parents to come in and meet teachers).   It looks like it will be several weeks before we find out about funding, and will be able to order our parts, so we will begin this week with some lessons from other robot curricula I have taught.  We will also view some introductory videos this week, and learn a little about programming.

FTC Kickoff Event Day!

    Today was the day when USFirst revealed the description and rules for this season's FTC challenge, and it looks like it will be great fun. I posted the kickoff video from the USFirst website elsewhere in this blog, but here is a link to the video:  2014-2015 FTC kickoff video .  It involves teams working in pairs to have their robots pick up plastic balls of different sizes and place them into giant beakers, then push those beakers into "parking areas."  The good news for a rookie team like mine, is that more experienced teams will have to alter their current robots a good bit in order to make them better suited for this season's challenge.

2014 - 2015 FTC Cascade Effect

Registering the Team

    Since my first post, I have registered our SBW FTC team - we'll be called the "Tech Warriors" until my students come up with something better.  I have a list of 39 students who have expressed an interest in joining the club, so we should be able to satisfy the requirement of having between 10 and 15 members.  In fact, I am hopeful that our club will have 20 members all together; 15 "starters," with at least 5 alternates who can fill in if some students can't make an event.

    I have posted two videos of the FTC challenges from this past Saturday on YouTube.  Here are the links to the videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayn2pwkkt2M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA_7jG99Hhc

   Finally, I have applied for what is called the "rookie grant," which will waive the $275 registration fee our team would otherwise have to pay.  I have also heard of a grant that many starting teams apply for, which covers the cost of the "starter kits" of robot parts.  I will be researching this further, as these beginning kits can cost over $1,000.  I was told that most teams end up spending much more than that on their robots, so it's clear that fund raising and seeking sponsorships will be a big part of my position this year.  This will be especially true when our team starts to travel to events.

    Our first club meeting is this Wednesday after school.  I will be spending some time over the next two days putting together some introductory activities to kick off the year...

FTC at SBW, Day One

    Today, I went to the "Red Stick Rumble" to support my colleagues and students who were participating in the FRC challenge - and to learn a bit more about what I'm getting myself into by starting an FTC club at my school.  There has been an FRC - or First Robotics Challenge club - at my charter school for two years now, and the students have come a long way since I first started visiting their sessions when they started up.  Today's challenge involved the robots maneuvering what looked like giant exercise balls around a course set up in the gym of a Baton Rouge high school, throwing said balls through goals and over obstacles, and trying to block competitors from doing the same.  It reminded me of a robot version of basketball mixed with soccer, and it was entertaining watching these hundred pound robots whizzing around the court, playing this hybrid sport.
    One thing I noticed about the competitors, however, was that most teams had a litany of sponsorships listed when they were first introduced, while our school had none whatsoever.  Clearly, part of the challenge of establishing our teams will be to seek sponsorship, then broaden that sponsorship.
    Our students handled themselves very well, and I was happy and impressed to see what they had accomplished and learned moving in to their third year participating in this competition.

    After cheering on our existing team, I went to the cafeteria to learn more about FTC, or First Tech Challenge, which is what I have been recruited to start at my school.  I was pleased to find robots of a more modest size then those competing in FRC - but no less sophisticated.  I was expecting Lego Mindstorms kits or simple remote-controlled robots, but was pleased to find that the robots were larger and the course was more interesting.  Last year, I helped my son win a gold medal at the Science Olympiad regionals in a robotics competition called "Robo-cross," which called for using a remote control to guide a robot through a small course where a small amount of objects were picked up, then placed in a bucket.  I expected this competition to be similar, but found it to instead be more rigorous and therefore more interesting and entertaining.
    School teams competed four at a time, with two teams at a time placed randomly in alliance with each other, so each round had a red team and a blue team.  When a round began, the robots had to move autonomously - according to directions programmed into their "brains" - for the first thirty seconds of the round.  Then, the robots were switched to "tele-op" mode, where they were controlled by "drivers" wielding USB game controllers.  During this stage, robots were guided through picking up blocks, then putting them in bins on either side of a large scale, and had to keep an eye on keeping the two sides balanced.  The last thirty seconds of this mode was called the "end game," and the robots had unrelated tasks that they had to accomplish, such as raising a flag by winding a lever, or attaching themselves to a pull-up bar and raising themselves up.

    Needless to say, I came away from today's event feeling excited about getting our school's FTC club started.  I introduced myself to a few of the teachers and volunteers leading existing FTC clubs, and came away with some great advice for getting started.