Have a Great Summer

Good Luck to the rest of the Moonbots finalists!  Our blog will be on hiatus until next time.  Please visit our FTC team website if you would like to keep update on our Rookie Season and our various community projects!

www.brickbuddies.org

Rocket City Space Pioneers partnership

We are very excited to announce our mentor team – Rocket City Space Pioneers (RCSP)!

Google Lunar X Prize team RCSP hails from Huntsville, Alabama (aka Rocket City!) We’ve exchanged emails with RCSP Team Lead Tim Pickens, and look forward to Skyping with him next week. We find out if we’re moving up to Phase 2 on July 5th.

Getting out-of-the-box is the only way to get to the moon!

Brick Buddies Explorers TEAM Video Submission!

This is our Lunar Education Video: How Can Robots Influence Future Space Missions, including going back to the Moon?

Robot Design

We met today to talk about our Robot’s Design.

We talked about possible a chassis design and came up with several different ideas. We decided on one of them and started prototyping. We each made a few different prototypes based on what we think some of the obstacles will be in challenge.  We used some of the rovers we researched for our video as inspiration for the design.  It was also helpful to talk about the same qualities we use when building a robot for FLL.   Three of us have participated in First LEGO League before and two have not. Two were on Brick Buddies last year and one on TechnoForce.  We discussed the parameters of the robot:  Where it must travel, How will the terrain affect it; What jobs will it have to perform; How can it be built robustly.  When the meeting was over we went swimming and had a lot of fun.

Thanks! – Elizabeth

Looking At the Video Questions

Hey! We had our first meeting and it went great!  Here are some things we did.

First, we learned more about Moonbots and watched the video on the Moonbots website. Then, we picked out a question from the choices; we selected ‘How Can Robots Influence Future Space Missions, including Missions to the Moon?’ To answer the question, we decided to split into three pairs and did research.  We then discussed which items we thought were essential to future exploration.  Everyone helped with the narration.  View our video on the VIDEOS page!

Thanks – Elizabeth

Team Brick Buddies Exploring Robotics through Moonbots!

This summer, our community robotics team is taking part in the 2011 Moonbots Challenge. We see this as a great way to increase our programming and problem solving skills as well as a fantastic way for potential new team members to join us and experience the competitive robotics schedule for a short summer sprint!