Bricktron for Haiti

We are team Bricktron. We come from the Lower Hudson Valley Challenger Center. We have 10 members on our team in 5^th grade to 9^th grade. The theme of this year competition is Smart Move. The challenge is to come up with better, more efficient ways to transport people and goods around the world.

We based our research project on the earthquake in Haiti. We wanted to find a way to find a way to transport resources such as water and first aid supplies easily and efficiently in Haiti.

We decided to build a robot to do such a task. The robot has room to hold a water bottle and a box of first aid supplies. It has a camera mounted in the front to take pictures and help in the effort to find survivors. It is remote controlled and easily maneuverable.

It has a pair of treads instead of wheels to drive over the Haitian landscape easily. The final robot will be bigger, to hold more supplies, more durable, and be water proof. We want to have a lot of the robots made and sent to Haiti to help with the rescue efforts. We hope our efforts will help the Haitian community in its time of need.

With This project, along with the rest of our efforts in the FIRST LEGO League Competition, we took First place at our qualifying competition this year held at Grady Elementary School on January 30, 2010. We hope to share our project with more of the Haitian Community and hope the best for them in the months of recovery. Our project is in the spirit of FIRST and to give back to those in need.

We hope that we can win the our next competition on February 27 at Duchess Community College and represent our community in Taiwan for the FIRST LEGO League International open.

Nice Pics

Check out http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?page=1&aid=197329&id=84368498760

Success

We did awesome at our competition. 1st place. Oh, and if you happened to not know, we switched our research project topic and decided to focus on Haiti. Which worked out pretty well for us. Considering we got in 1st place...

Overview 11/2

On Moday we mainly studied research. We found many things that go up into space. We now need to focus more on how we can get things up to space and now i have a solid list of ten ways that stuff is transported in the space community. On Tuesday we were back to programming and missions.

overview (harrison)

today ethan jack and i worked on making a technical presentation. i took pictures and gave ideas, jack worked on puting the actual presentation together, and ethan worked on creating the graphics. we created cards for the speech and rehursed them. all in all i learned a couple of things about our robot that i didn't know such as the fact we had a claw to get the hoops.

10/26/09 overview (ethan's point of view :D)

Well, we now have started on our technical presentation (me, Jack and Harrison). Harrison's taking photos, jacks typing and I'm doing graphic design. We've basically finished all the index cards and finished rehearsing reading them. Now we're done, Lee is impressed, and we get to play with cool little lego cars. Well, we've made a good amount of progress so far...

10/26/09 overview

Today me, Ethan and Harrison worked on the technical presentation. We made small flash cards with informational facts about our robot, its attachments and the program in the prosess of making the presentation I learned a few things. For instance before I began the technical presentation i had no idea how many different objectives our robots attachments were capable of, also i was not so sure about our programs features until now. In the proscess of the meeting today i was also able to organise my thoughts about the robopt and the program into a semi-rough draft of a presentation for the technical. We werwe also able to take a few pictures of the robot.

Research Script

The research script is going through revisions. We have some new good ideas. We did an okay job at the competition. We will improve our Scores. Wahooo. Wahooo.

Bricktron blue is better than bricktron black

I am so scared about the tourment. Its about 12 hours away. I hope we get 150 to 350. I don't want 10 points. I also hope we win. At least win the first round.

Our tornament is tomorow and everyone on the team is really scared and nervous but also very determand and ready to go. Even though everyone seems that we could do better im happy with our test scores because the other scores of other teams are pretty low.



WISH US LUCK! :-)
Bricktron Blue Rocks

TWITCH

Weeks 7,8,9

Wow, the weeks are going by fast! 

we've definitely made some great progress in all fields.  The mission and building groups have started completing missions and i think we're ready to start putting things together.  

Despite all that we've had many many issues with our robot, so much so that i had the team build a secondary robot just in case..that too works well.  

But i think we're buckling down with our initial design and making it work no matter what! 

The research team has been working on  scripts and design for their presentation, but we definitely need to clean up and make sure that our information is good and correct and that the stuff we have is clean.  

Time is getting short, we have to prepare for the tournament no matter where we are...all that coming soon! 

also we've gotten saturday space at suffern HS! what a great treat, so much space to utilize and i wish there were more teams for us to work with there.  We almost left a robot there, luckily someone was able to pick it up and bring it back! 

antartica

Glaciers are tons of snow that start to move out and down because they are so heavy.
They cover over 10% of the earth.
They erode the ground beneath them.
75% of the world's fresh water is frozen into glacier water!
Glaciers originate on land from snowfall that doesn't me in the summer after several years!
http://www.cedarville.edu/academics/education/resource/schools/chca/3socsas/glaciers.htm
The Antarctic ice sheet is losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year.
The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea levels by an estimated 20 feet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html

Holland flooding

Holland is flooding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOOrnbrVxIM

Weeks 5&6

Its getting hard to keep up,

but week 5 and 6 mark the finishing of the robot and really getting into the stages of programming. We've also taken a break from the research project, but i'm planning on dedicating some time for just research through our 7th and 8th weeks.




We're really having trouble programming a robot that i think should be a little simpler to program. I'll write something for them to help get directions for both the rear wheel and the steering wheel at the same time. Also i think that they'll need a program to straighten the wheels more reliably every time








I did give them a bit of a break tho, we did a 'freebuild' day where i let them go at it with parts, but in an attempt to teach them something i broke out Isogawa's Toranomaki. Although they didnt finish some of the projects it was cool to get them to understand and use some mechanisms out of LEGO. Maybe they'll get a chance to finish their projects at another time. Imagine that though, i didnt get pics of that day, but i got most of everything else.

Also i may get an assistant to the team, it'll be great for the team to have another person there who knows their stuff. Next 2 weeks...i'll be splitting up the teams, good luck Bricktron Black and Blue.

Presentation # 2 & #3 India and Piermont

Presentation #2

• Monsoon floods killed 59 in the past 3 days and 2,364 since June
• Authorities are using motorboats and military helicopters
• house collapse has killed 14 people
• 6 feet of deep water
• 4.7 in. fell in 5 hrs.
• Piermont's location is a penninsula in the Hudson River
• it is south of the tappan zee bridge
• piermont is on the west bank of the hudson river
• some ideas for peventing water damage are : water drainage, dam/ levees, water paths, more storm drains, lifting houses.
• some of these ideas may never work but water drainage and more storm drains are the most possible of them all
  

Presentation #3

Or reasearch project is to:

1. Define a problem
2. find a solution
3. find a place in another part of the world with that problem
4. look and compare their solutionns to our solutions

We have found out:

1. Flooding in Piermont
2. UNKOWN
3. India (maybe chicago but we do not have much information
4. UNKNOWN

Some other information is:

• The Brahmaputra River floods Northeast India
• 170 villages were in waist deep water
• "Kaziranga National Park, home to tigers, elephants, panthers, bears, and the world’s largest population of one-horned rhinoceroses, was also more than 50 percent flooded, said BBC."
• Rain flooded the Mahanadi River in Orissa India
• "Not only is the Mahanadi clearly swollen in this image, but its northern neighbor, the Brahmani is also flooded. "
• The Brahmani river has flooded almost 1,850 villages and is said to be the worst flood in 50 years.
• The floods killed 29 people and affected mor than 4 million

Week 4

Ever progressing, we're 4 weeks in meaning we've had only 4 or 5 meetings .. i'm trying to imagine if we had 4 meetings in one or two weeks, could we be where we are now?

The build team is really striding. We're all hoping the robot is going to work. I think we should have a backup plan as well. They all want to build, so they should.

We're all gearing up for missions, and making our planning as solid as possible. Each team is adjusting to the coming robot, and there's still much to do. The robot team has to speed up.

Bret and his research team are really picking up a lot of information about this project, from flooding in chicago to india. Now we have to find some experts in the field to find out how they deal with it and come up with a solution of their own. So two parts of the project are down. I really want to have a wonderful creative solution and presentation for them to knock'm dead.



this week we have two meetings, and saturday meetings to come in october, november and december. As busy as we are, we need to have a little fun

India flooding

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/22/india.floods/
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/10/asia/indiaflood.php
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/shownh.php3?img_id=15058
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=15082

• 2,364 people have died in monsoon floods since June
  
• Latest deaths in Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Orissa and Uttaranchal
  
• Authorities are using motor boats and military helicopters for rescue

Chicago Flooding

Chicago flooding at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/disasters-accidents/floods/03005000.topic

notes on reasearch

• Flooding is the No. 1 most likely natural disaster in the US.
• Floods happen a lot in piermont.
• one person is raising his house but many cannot
• no construction is allowed under 10 ft. mean sea level
• this century it will rise two feet.
• puppet show with legos
• game show
• skit
• video
• backup powerpoint or back ground
  
• poster and pointer
• flooding in chicago

By the reasearch team