Welcome to the New Heights: Adventures for Teens Blog!
Enjoy the read and check back often!
Sean, Jeremy, Wayne and the NHLRBT Members
Competition update: The Epic SHEEP
We, The Epic sheep have participated in our very first, FIRST LEGO robotics competition! Although we didn’t make finals (or semi-finals) we had a great time. Our robot got us fairly consistent scores, we are proud to say that we earned 85 points in our first time at the table, 76 points in our second time at the table, and 85 points at our final table competition. We did very well with our project, even though we had some slight technical difficulties. Our favorite parts were Core Values, where we had to work together to make a skit, and having fun. Now we are moving on to perfect all our missions, and will compete against our coaches in Dec. We just redesigned our robot, and hope to make it go faster!
More to come,
The Epic SHEEP
Robotics team mixes fun with life lessons – Portsmouth Herald
Our FIRST LEGO League teams made the front page of the Portsmouth Herald today!
Check it out:
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20111112-NEWS-111120326
Thanks to our sponsors The Frechette Family & Daystar Computer services for making this all possible.
Great job teams!
Teams show-off for Families First Parents and Kids.
Today both the Epic Sheep, and the Robots of Earth had the opportunity to show off their robots and talk about their problem to parents and kids from Families First Monday Night program.
The teams did great in one of our first public displays of the season. After the presentation a FF parent took me aside and said, “The boys team communicated well while running their missions, and the young lady running missions for the girls team did not fold under pressure when one of the missions did not work. Those are some great teams you have there.”
We are so very proud of the progress the team members have made and can’t wait to see what they can accomplish this week.
Our next public showing of the mission boards will be on November 10th from 5-5:30 for the parents and participants of New Heights. We will be having a few presentations out in the community too, so keep your eyes here for dates and times.
T-Shirts & Stickers are here!
We have received our awesome t-shirts and stickers!
Can’t wait to hand out our stickers at UNH this weekend.
Week 3 Updates
Hello again! We have made fairly good progress this week. We have almost worked to the troubles with our trailer, and are close to finding a food safety problem relevant to hershey kisses. We have found a design for a claw that will pickup various items, and are almost done making it. We will update the blog again soon.
From, The Epic SHEƎP
Robot Expo in Nashua, NH
Over the weekend I was able to attend a great event at the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH. There were teams from all divisions of FIRST (FLL,FTC,FRC).
The event was a lot of fun and as a coach of a Rookie year team it was helpful to be able to ask other coaches questions and talk with some of the team members. I also got some great information about FTC and how to go about starting a high school team. More on that soon.
It was helpful seeing some of the solutions that FLL teams have came up with and being able to see some different robot builds. It’s amazing how so many different designs can complete the same challenges.
Thanks to The PVC Pirates for hosting the event!
Week 2 Update
Update from The Epic Sheep:
This week we have almost completed our trailer that catches bacteria and viruses from the dispencers on the board. The only issue is that it doesn’t turn, so our robot has lot of trouble pulling/pushing it. We have a way to connect things (like our trailer) to our robot using rubber bands. It seem to be simple, and work very well.
We also started programing our robot to hit the lever on the first dispenser that holds the pink bacteria. It has gone very well, but we don’t know if it works as our trailer can’t be moved by the robot.
Next week we will continue to program, build, and fix our trailer. We are looking into a way to build a claw that can pick things up like fish, rats, pizza and ice-cream. The last thing we worked on was our project. We researched problems that could go wrong with our food, Hershey’s Kisses.
More to come. The Epic Sheep
Update from the Robots of Earth:
Wednesday
We started to make the base for our robot. We also started with our programming. We made a test program.
We started dividing and subdividing the missions and figured out which ones that we’re going to do. We are doing: Balls, viruses and the good and bad bacteria (sink). We started the program for the pink bacteria.
Friday
We finished building the main part for the robot.
We were able to start and finish the yellow and blue balls programs. After that, we started our research. Our problem is preservatives, and our food is potato chips.
The Robots of Earth
Teams Visit UNH for Full Day of Food Fun!
Today we went to UNH for our first hands on food factor experience. We were lucky enough to tour and talk with professionals at Woodman Farm, The Dairy Barn, and finally Holloway Commons dining facility.
At Woodman Farm, Evan explained all the varieties of fruit they grow at the facility, and we even got some apples for snack. YUM!
At the dairy barn, John gave us the chance to pet all the cows at the facility. We even went into the milking machine.
Finally we toured Holloway Commons from the loading dock, through the coolers, into the kitchen, ending in the dining hall where we enjoyed ALL kinds of food and sugary goodness. Thank you UNH and we look forward to our next trip!
Coaches Work Quickly to Prepare for First Meetings
Sean, Jeremy, and Wayne had a great time the other day starting to setup one of the FLL Food Factor Practice tables.
Watch this time lapse of part of our day and see us moving quickly to prepare for our teams first meeting next week.