week 9

This week was a great success.
We managed to stick all of the paper forest floor map together. Our buddies really enjyed doing that this week beacause we also got to make all the houses and other obstacles we needed. Our buddies each made really cool houses, Sarah made the Gingerbread house and, Alishia made the wood cutters house, the houses were both great and they both put in alot of effort. We found some really great looking, realistic trees, which we have several of. We also completly finished drawing and clouring in the black lines for the robot to follow, on the forest floor.Today at Bethlehem Primary we acheived alot, even though we didn't get to do any programming, and we all had a fun time today.

At luch we left and cycled back to Otumoeai Intermediate

week 7

Today we only had half as much time at Bethlehem because we had to stay at our school for an assembly. 

At Bethlehem today we mostly created our big map. We all stuck most of the 6 by 6 map together though it still isn't completely finished. We drew in some of the black lines for the robot to follow and then coloured them in. I gave our buddies jobs to do, which were to build gingerbread house and the woodcutter’s house. Hopefully the houses turn out really good.

Then we had to leave for school. 

From a Year 4

Using the laptops was fun and confusing, not to mention hard. Programming the robots on the laptop was hard because I've never programmed a robot before. The very first time it was a bit boring because I did not know what to do. Doing the forest floor was not difficult at all. I felt very creative. It was great fun. It was all about making the map look great and I felt like a famous artist.

Programming the robots was very hard; we had to get our robot around the bottle and back over the blue line. My team failed.

3rd Visit !

This morning we cycled to Bethlehem, the weather was fine but on the way back the rain started and we got saturated, so we had to change into our P.E gear.

Firstly we were creating objects for our forest floor, for that we went outside and collected various twigs, etc. We came back inside and started making our trees, which we made by attaching paper rolls around the stalks of the branches so that they would stand up. We also made Rupunzel's tower which looks really cool and girly. Next week we will make the 3 little pigs house, and continue to collect branches for the forest. We all joined in to make the forest floor and our buddies came up with some really groovy ideas. At morning tea it started spitting a bit and then stopped. Two little 5 year olds challenged Miss Cording and asked with some attitude, “Why the big kids were invading their playground?” and of course Miss Cording had to answer back nicely... Ha-ha.

After morning tea our group had to program our robots to follow a loop, using the light sensor. We hadn’t exactly learnt how to program the light sensors, and we looked pretty dumb in front of the Year 4’s. We used an instruction guide and we found out how to program the light sensor. Our aim that day was to teach the Year 4’s how to program the robots by themselves. We weren’t allowed to touch our laptop, so we had to explain to our buddies how to work the NXT software. The Year 4’s soon learnt how to do it all by themselves. Sadly, we didn’t get to test our programming on the robot today because we didn’t get enough time and the robots were always being used. We had something to eat and it was time to say good-bye. We cycled back to Otumoetai Intermediate in the rain, not leaving one piece of clothing dry.

 

Robo-Mania !

Today when we were cycling someone started clowning around and fell off their bike. We still made it to B.S but later than we expected. It was a good session, firstly we were divided in to two groups (Green and Yellow) we were Yellow Group which meant we were first up for programming the robots, we managed to get our robot to go in a straight line. Soon after that Priscila added a few adjustments to the programming (several 360's). We taught the year 4's how to use the programming software so that they could understand what was going on. Morning tea was before the next rotation, we had so much fun on the playground and we didn't want it to end. Later that day we were shifted onto creating the forest floor, which our group did well in. We created a time lapse video (see below) we added some other fairy tail characters into the forest design (including, The 3 little pigs, Rapunzel's tower, Candy mountain, a haunted valley etc.) We found out that our buddies were every creative and they enjoyed designing the forest floor more than anything that day. Now we are up to creating our proper forest floor and continuing to try to program our robots to follow a basic black line. We are also considering entering Robo-cup Dance and are planning  to program it to do some basic steps from the hoedown throw-down, if all else goes well. We worked well with our buddies today and we're sure that next week will be better. We are really looking forward to next week when we can continue to make progress with our robots.

What A Day !

Today at Bethlehem School we were introduced to our 8 year old buddies. 

We got along with our buddies pretty well and had a good time as well.

We managed to set up a g-mail and blog which is useful.

We programmed our NXT robot to go around a milk bottle and back of over the yellow line, we had trouble with programming the robot because it kept on pausing and going and pausing and going.

We filmed our robot on i-Movie HD and it will be part of our documentary that we have to complete this term.

Oh, by the way the playground was awesome fun but some little kids in year 3 stole some of my lunch ): 

We left Bethlehem School at 11:00am which was quite early as next time we will leave at 12:30pm.

Cant wait till next time !!!