Well after many schedule changes, a lot of stress and exhaustion we are almost finished with the MoonBots challenge for this year! We have overcome many challenges this MoonBots season and I am very proud of the work our team has done! Our biggest challenge was that we were having a hard time finding a space to set up our challenge board in so we asked if we could use the schools stage. That space was definitely big enough, but easily accessible to many people, (people who are very interested in playing with LEGOs) we had one day where we came in and our program wasn't working AT ALL and we were so frustrated, until one of the team members realized that the launch pad had been moved on the board!
Another major challenge was that the schools Internet would not allow us to use skype or any other public video chat feature, so the night before the competition we had to move the entire board to a house a couple of blocks away from the school. It was an interesting experience, one I would NOT encourage others to do. Lets just say that the challenge board is a LOT easier to disassemble (practically effortless) then it is to assemble! We basically had to rebuild everything before the competition.
Its okay though, it was all worth it at 5:30am Hawaii Time when we met to have our judges interview..granted the sun wasnt up and we had to get creative with the lighting so that the challenge board could even be seen with the webcam, and most of the team was half asleep, I think we did great during our interview, and our robot did exactly as it was supposed to the very first time!
Overall I think MoonBots 2.0 was a great experience for our island. We were able to educate 7,000 people about how they use STEM in their everyday lives, showcase a LEGO moonscape to 350 elementary school students, represent the entire state of Hawaii in a global competition, and expand our own critical thinking and inquiry skills. While we are happy that it is all over now and we can take a breather, we are looking forward to the possibility of competing in next years challenge!
Signing out for Molokai Mahina 2.0,
Aunty Jenn
Molokai Mahina 2.0 Coach
Friday, August 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Final Countdown!
Hi my name is Luke Kikukawa.
Today’s practice was really challenging, but I think that we got a lot accomplished! First of all we had to finish programming our robot. The total inaccuracy of it has been puzzling us for the past three weeks. It just won’t work some of the time! Yesterday we felt like our robot was having crazy “mood swings” and it was changing course on different tries of the exact same program! But today we came up with the simplest program ever. I hope… no I KNOW it will work but I’m still a little worried. The judges will be a little astonished when they see it.
Another thing we finished today was transporting the ENTIRE lunar surface to another location. We did this because we needed an internet connection that will enable us to Skype the judges. The internet at the school does not allow us to access Skype, so we had to move the competition somewhere we could use Skype. To move it we had to divide the entire playing area into sections. Despite this precaution, many of the sections ended up breaking apart, but we made sure none of the 2,000 orange moon rocks spilt on the floor or got lost. After a lot of hard work, we had moved the lunar surface to its new location and half an hour later we had finished “repairing” it and put it back together. Anyway, I think we’re ready for tomorrow morning and that we will be able to impress the judges. We’re all still frightened of the fact we’ll have to wake up at 5 AM or earlier on a school day!
Boy do we love MoonBots,
Luke Kikukawa
Today’s practice was really challenging, but I think that we got a lot accomplished! First of all we had to finish programming our robot. The total inaccuracy of it has been puzzling us for the past three weeks. It just won’t work some of the time! Yesterday we felt like our robot was having crazy “mood swings” and it was changing course on different tries of the exact same program! But today we came up with the simplest program ever. I hope… no I KNOW it will work but I’m still a little worried. The judges will be a little astonished when they see it.
Another thing we finished today was transporting the ENTIRE lunar surface to another location. We did this because we needed an internet connection that will enable us to Skype the judges. The internet at the school does not allow us to access Skype, so we had to move the competition somewhere we could use Skype. To move it we had to divide the entire playing area into sections. Despite this precaution, many of the sections ended up breaking apart, but we made sure none of the 2,000 orange moon rocks spilt on the floor or got lost. After a lot of hard work, we had moved the lunar surface to its new location and half an hour later we had finished “repairing” it and put it back together. Anyway, I think we’re ready for tomorrow morning and that we will be able to impress the judges. We’re all still frightened of the fact we’ll have to wake up at 5 AM or earlier on a school day!
Boy do we love MoonBots,
Luke Kikukawa
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Published!
Check out this great article from the Molokai Dispatch- They forgot to write about our sponsors so we will ask them for a correction in next weeks paper!
Enjoy!
http://www.themolokaidispatch.com/moon-minded
Enjoy!
http://www.themolokaidispatch.com/moon-minded
Friday, August 5, 2011
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
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
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Robot Designs, Community Outreach and Lunar Surface Gloom
Hey everyone!
First of all, thank you for following out blog and supporting the Molokai Mahina MoonBots Team! This is Michael Kikukawa, reporting in for my first Blog of the Summer! MoonBots has been moving along very quickly on Molokai, I'm happy we've all been able to keep up so far! Right now the three main focuses of our attention in the MoonBots challenge are: building our MoonBots Challenge lunar surface out of LEGO pieces, designing and building our AWESOME robot, and completing our community outreach project.
Building our MoonBots lunar surface is turning out to be harder than we expected. This is mainly because not all of the pieces necessary to complete the challenge board were sent in the mail (so we're missing some pieces!) and, secondly, because if we do not follow the instructions for constructing the board to the letter, we end up missing more pieces than we were in the beginning! We are overcoming this obstacle by "borrowing" or substituting LEGO pieces from other kits and home and for the ones that are missing and paying extra attention to the way we build the components of the board.
Unlike the board, designing our robot has been just as hard as we thought it would be. The main challenge is simply climbing over the crater walls but we think we've had a break through in this area so we should be able to climb the crater walls at our next practice! (SO EXCITED!) I don't want to jinx our robot (and I don't want to release any classified information, everything I write is already going to be censored by our CENSORED Team Captain) so I'm not going to tell you how we did this just yet. Our next challenge will be figuring out how to collect the Water Ice once we have entered the craters, but we think we'll be able to use some techniques we've used in the past to complete that aspect of the mission.
The final focus of our attention is on our community outreach project. We are going to submit a collage/article to our local newspaper on how STEM is used and substantial in everyday life on our island, but a new component we will be adding is a PSA (Public Service Announcement) on the same topic that we hope to have air on our island-wide television station. These two fronts, combined with our large following on Facebook should help us reach thousands of people around Hawaii and inform them about our project and the importance of STEM.
So, despite the difficulties, we've been working hard and hope to accomplish a lot before school begins in a week (to soon!).
A Hui Hou (until we meet again!),
Michael K.
First of all, thank you for following out blog and supporting the Molokai Mahina MoonBots Team! This is Michael Kikukawa, reporting in for my first Blog of the Summer! MoonBots has been moving along very quickly on Molokai, I'm happy we've all been able to keep up so far! Right now the three main focuses of our attention in the MoonBots challenge are: building our MoonBots Challenge lunar surface out of LEGO pieces, designing and building our AWESOME robot, and completing our community outreach project.
Building our MoonBots lunar surface is turning out to be harder than we expected. This is mainly because not all of the pieces necessary to complete the challenge board were sent in the mail (so we're missing some pieces!) and, secondly, because if we do not follow the instructions for constructing the board to the letter, we end up missing more pieces than we were in the beginning! We are overcoming this obstacle by "borrowing" or substituting LEGO pieces from other kits and home and for the ones that are missing and paying extra attention to the way we build the components of the board.
Unlike the board, designing our robot has been just as hard as we thought it would be. The main challenge is simply climbing over the crater walls but we think we've had a break through in this area so we should be able to climb the crater walls at our next practice! (SO EXCITED!) I don't want to jinx our robot (and I don't want to release any classified information, everything I write is already going to be censored by our CENSORED Team Captain) so I'm not going to tell you how we did this just yet. Our next challenge will be figuring out how to collect the Water Ice once we have entered the craters, but we think we'll be able to use some techniques we've used in the past to complete that aspect of the mission.
The final focus of our attention is on our community outreach project. We are going to submit a collage/article to our local newspaper on how STEM is used and substantial in everyday life on our island, but a new component we will be adding is a PSA (Public Service Announcement) on the same topic that we hope to have air on our island-wide television station. These two fronts, combined with our large following on Facebook should help us reach thousands of people around Hawaii and inform them about our project and the importance of STEM.
So, despite the difficulties, we've been working hard and hope to accomplish a lot before school begins in a week (to soon!).
A Hui Hou (until we meet again!),
Michael K.
Friday, July 22, 2011
We are connected...are you?!
We have several social medias we are using to update people on our progress...check 'em out!
www.molokaimahina.yolasite.com
Our public facebook group: Molokai Mahina 2.0 MoonBots Team
and of course this blog: www.molokaimahina.blogspot.com
You can check out the other teams and get more information about the competition at moonbots.org
And we would love to hear your questions and feedback if you have any!
www.molokaimahina.yolasite.com
Our public facebook group: Molokai Mahina 2.0 MoonBots Team
and of course this blog: www.molokaimahina.blogspot.com
You can check out the other teams and get more information about the competition at moonbots.org
And we would love to hear your questions and feedback if you have any!
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
2nd Brown Package!
We received our second, very large and verrrrrrrryyyy heavy package today! We can't hardly wait to open it up and start building the mission field! Check back for more pictures tomorrow!
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