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.

Research

• Switch to florescent lights to compare one florescant to 13 incandescent light bulbs
• Turn of all lights to save power at night
• Solar fans save about 10% of energy during summer
• Solar panels use no power from the grid
• Recycle and save up to about 50% of our garbage
• Turn of all objects that use up power and save about 10% energy
• Soil on roof lowers energy bill in winter and summer
• Windows on south of the challenger center heats up and saves up 10-20% of gas bill
• Hot rocks warm house at night and saves energy at night
• we could use a hydro dam and conserve energy with water but there are no streams in ther area
• we could use wind turbines but there is not alot of high wind speeds in this area
• by Bret & Max