Latest Update!

Hey everyone,
It’s Michael Kikukawa again, reporting for my second blog this summer. Time has been flying by (and that’s not necessarily a good thing) for the Molokai Mahina MoonBots team.
With school already finished with its first week (yes, Hawaii ends summer way too early), we have been forced to spend less time with our robot and more time with our homework. :( Before I begin my blog on our advancement as a team, I would like to take the time to congratulate some of our individual successes. We have two freshmen on the team, and they have started their high school careers very well. Luke has had no problem at all making plenty of friends and Alex has advanced very well in volleyball tryouts and will find out if she made the team today. Congratulations Alex and Luke! James is our only senior and has been doing his part for MoonBots while working for the public library. I have been busy, busy, busy with Student Council and three or four other clubs. Our coach recently became the Executive Director for our local Humane Society, so she is very busy as well. All of us are also on the high school VEX Robotics team, which meets twice a week after school. So it’s definitely become hard to make time to meet.
Despite these difficulties, our team worked this week on completing our robot; finishing the CAD version of it; editing our video community outreach project; and submitting our newspaper community outreach photos, interviews and essay.
In terms of our robot, we have successfully built it (although we continue to make small modifications as we come across problems in our original design) and are working on successfully programming it. Programming has taken up a lot of our time as every inch counts! So far we’ve enabled our robot to pick up two (almost four!) hydrogen 3 pieces and climb a crater wall all by itself. Our next challenge will be to pick up the water ice and complete the other challenges. Hopefully, before we know it, we’ll be programming it to return to base.
We have also finished our CAD design, although every addition to our robot has to be transferred to our CAD version of it.
James is heading our video community outreach project (since he did such an amazing job on our Phase One video) and we can’t wait to see what he will think of for this one! Our newspaper article should be in next week’s paper (our paper is only published once a week!) featuring some of the photos we each took, an interview, and an article that Alex wrote and I edited. We can’t wait to see it!
In other news, our final judging interview has been rescheduled for August 18th (our original time was during school) but the timing will be hard… it’s at 6 AM Hawaii Time! Talk about tough. PLUS we dont think we will be able to get SKYPE on our schools internet, which is where the challenge board is currently set up. But it’s all just the price we have to pay to participate in this competition and we’re happy for the opportunity (although waking up at 5:15 AM or earlier isn’t my idea of a good start to the day).
Until next time,
Michael Kikukawa
Student Team Co-Captain