Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

Me and our Team our intending on doing a lot this summer. Mount and get the camera working on the EDU bot (It has a TTL serial port no?! :p ). Make a two transmission VEX robot :ahh: !! Learn AutoCAD and perfect 3DS MAX.
Finish our team manual and admission requirements for new applicants to the team.

Learn how to make a new thread :(

And of course fund raising

Money money money money...............MONEY :D

great summer

P.S. anyone else done any of this before

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

Our team (The Techtigers) will also be doing some work during the summer. Most of the Juniors in our team (that includes me) will be taking a fundamentals of engineering class at FAU. We are also planning on prototyping a gear box, (just for the fun of it) and put it on our 2004 robot. Maybe if the opportunity presents we will do fundraiser, we don't have any plans yet but im sure we will do something to raise money. ;)

Dave

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

yeah this summer my school is hoping to break away from 461 and start our own team. So this summer we will be fundraising till we are sick of asking for money, building a operational vex robot, getting a lab setup for the upcoming season, training all the rookies that we are recruiting, getting a website up, learning 3dsmax, and of course building a crate for our robot. Also I'll be swithbacking over to the 461 meetings this summer while we build an experimental crab if they get the funding for the project. Robotics is year round!

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

R&D, get sponsors, R&D, fund raise, R&D, get sponsors, R&D, fund raise, and recruit people

Me personally:
1. practice and hopefully master Inventor
2. practice driving the robot (driver-driver-coach-robot coordination)
3. get someone else to work on and master 3ds max
4. R&D
5. get sponsors
6. fund raise

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

My team and I will be working on several different summer projects.

1. Extensive redesign and rebuild of our tetra arm.

We will spend the time between now and IRI redesigning our tetra arm. This year, we had many issues with it, including poor grip on the tetras and difficulty in controlling the arm. We did redesign our hook several times during the season, and we did seem to find a suitable passive hook design. By the end of the championships we could cap about 4 tetras per match, and our best was 5 in a match. However, we will try to come up with an entirely new design so that we can see what would have made our performance even better, and to give the newer members (and even veterans) a chance to learn new things.

2. Three Robotics Camps - "RoboCamp", and 2 sessions of "RoboCamp for Girls"

I, along with my mother, Mr. Lindsay our team coach, and another teacher from Seymour Smith Elementary School, are going to be offering a Lego robotics camp for boys and girls, and two sessions of Lego camp exclusively for girls. The regular robotics camp will be open to students in the Pine Plains, NY school district (Seymour Smith), as will one of the girl's camps. The other girls camp will be held for the Region One (Connecticut) school district. RoboCamp is offered to students in grades four through six. They will learn the basics of programming, building, and sensor integration, in just 5 days :ahh:. I have developed an extensive curriculum to teach the students these aspects of Lego robotics, and I am currently developing it further to make it an even better experience for the kids (and easier on the teacher). I am planning on taking records of the teaching techniques and activities that I utilize, so that I can hopefully publish the curriculum here on Chief Delphi as a white paper (or series of white papers)... sometime in the future. I use a combination of hands on activities (which I am trying to emphasize even more this year), direct lessons aided with Power Point, and "watch and follow" teaching - not sure how else to describe it, but basically you do something in front of the class (this is good for programming), and the students follow along by doing it themselves. I am also trying to allow for differentiated learning - which basically means that I am trying to allow the kids to move at their own pace. Naturally, within a class, you will find kids who will be stronger and grasp concepts faster than others, and then there will be a few who don't catch on as quickly. I want my teaching to allow for these differences, so that the quicker kids don't feel like they are being hindered, and the slower kids don't feel overwhelmed. It's tricky. I am also using many of the resources provided by the Carnegie Mellon "Robotics Academy" website. http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/education/ Check it out. There are great resources - Camps on a Disk, and Video Trainers that are excellent tools for teaching.

Hopefully, these camps will be a success.

3. Fundraising!

Everyone has fundraising to do!

We will be working on coordinating our summer fundraisers, scheduling to meet with new and returning sponsors to ask for money, and making those visits. Our official fundraising season started May 1st, and its time to get moving! As well as meeting with sponsors, our team often makes appearances at local community events, such as Canaan, CT's Railroad Days Celebration, and the Sharon Audubon Festival. We sell things like T-shirts, flying frogs, and flashing lights, as well as chances to drive the robot. We also occasionally do a raffle.


4. Boston University Design Competition

Myself, Dillon (CmptrGk), and two other members of our team are going to be participating in a mini-robotics competition (not affiliated with FIRST) at Boston University on June 4th. While this isn't really summer, more like late spring... it is an off season project of ours, and I thought I would mention it to let you all know about it, since it is pretty cool. More about it can be found at http://www.bu.edu/eng/design/


Good Luck to everyone in their summer endeavors!

-- Jaine

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

Our summer is during the building season (and so does our vacations :D )

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

My team puts on summer workshops on for 3rd-8th graders for fundraising. We also have car washes during the summer also.

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

First, our team will have a banquet on May 9th to round out this year. I think we may try to join the OCCRA in the fall. We may even compete in a few repeat events over the summer. The only other thing we will try and do is just fundraise for next year's competitions.

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

my team this year is going to host a robotics camp for i think ghi schol and junior highers. it will be awsome.

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

well we are gunna be doing some recruiting in a way we have 3 demo days at the elementary schools and then i think 2 middle school demos, we have a robotics night at the local minor league ball park there teams from around our area come and display their robots during the game, we will be making some prototype chassis and drives, we will be goin to PARC and Montclair Mayhem, we are gunna maybe try to get to IRI so we will be trying to keep busy this summer.

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

Now talking about IRI who all is going becuase my team #1501 is planning to go!!!

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

We fundraise and host robotics day camps of lego mindstorms, which, incidentally, is a nice way to both recruit kids and raise money at the same time :)

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

1) Robotics banquet in June, complete with pig roast and mentor roast. We will also hold our 3rd annual Umbrella Race on where you sit in an inner tube and use a large umbrella to sail across Lake Shinagog.
2) IRI in July. Pretty much my favorite off season competition. This year we’ll be in the talent show. Move over Dean Simmons and the Kamons.
3) Work to form another team in our area.
4) This year’s off season technical project will be to design and build a robotic hand. We’ll visit a local hospital’s prosthetics lab and meet with a doctor who works in the field.
5) We’ll again be one of the host teams for the Kettering Kick-off in September.

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

-Talk to over 450 boy scouts
-Trying to start talking to girl scouts
-Hosting a week long robotics class ran through our county and club
-Car washes
-Try and get a robotics Merit Badge for scouts
-Talk to Boys an Girls club of America
-Have a week long FLL based camp for interested kids in our community (age doesn't matter)
-Fix our 1st and 2nd year robot
-Try and recruit many more people to join our club
-Ask for large corporate sponsorships
-Hook up with the YMCA and try and teach a robotics class there
-Talk to anyone that will listen to me about robotics
-Do Dean's homework
-Revive old dead teams in GeorgiaSpark FIRST interest in other Cities
-Keep the Peachtree Regional Alive
-Try and talk to teachers about Jr. Lego-League and the upcoming year
-Display our robot at major events at the Ga Dome and Congress Center
-Revise our fundraising packet
-Hopefully a small robotics convention for the public and local business members in which all the teams in our county bring all their robots from all their different competitions and put them on display and help spread th messag of robotics and the spirit of FIRST

Re: Summer and Robotics?
 

We here at team 135's head quarters, also have summer camps for kids! In fact, last summer's session was our best one yet! We got kids from around the area involved with the autodesk inventor programs, photoshop, and they also welded some of their own trophies! Its good to know that there are other teams out there spreading the goodness of robotics around!