Patiently waiting....

We are still patiently waiting to hear the results from Phase 1 of the MoonBots competition...we are all very anxious to see which teams advance. We met today to keep working on our programming and had a few successes with collecting the water ice elements. We decided on a plan of attack for the mission, and that figured that collecting the Water Ice elements would be the most difficult so we wanted to tackle that first. Here is a video of our progress with that...

Over the past few weeks during the judging process our team has had plenty of time to reflect on our thoughts of this competition so far. When we first started this the students were really upset that I wasn't doing everything for them, I explained that it was part of the learning process, and even if it took longer or more attempts for them to complete the project at least they could say THEY did it, they weren't thrilled with the whole idea, especially since there were a LOT of 'banging their heads on the wall' moments, but today they finally admitted, even if we don't advance at least we learned a lot of neat new things! So from a coaches point of view, whether we advance or not, I think the Molokai Mahina MoonBot team was a success. I definitely think that the kids who participated in our MoonBots team gained a greater understanding of the moon and lunar exploration. They are even coming to class saying things like "Oh guess what, they found more water on the moon!" or "Check out these 7th graders who discovered something on mars"...and are really excited about it. Their experience on the team will also help them if they pursue robotics competitions in the future. One of our students has never programmed a robot before and spent the day today helping to create the successful water collecting program we used in the previous video!

One downside to this competition is that if we dont advance we are not going to be able to complete the mission on our own like we had planned. The mission challenge board requires wayyyyyyy more LEGO pieces then we have in our whole school, MAYBE on our entire island! We are still thinking of a way that we can test our robot so all of our hardwork is utilized at least to some extent.

Mahalo for following our blog this far keep checking back to hear the results of the Phase 1 portion of the competition... the judges said "on or before June 21st" so technically that gives them another roughly 8.5 hours if they are in Hawaii. (Im pretty sure they are in California somewhere because all of the time deadlines have been pacific time, so that gives them less than 5.5 more hours!) Until then, keep your fingers crossed for our team, we worked really hard and definitely deserve to make the top 20!!

a hui hou!

Jenn