Simple Machine Ideas To Consider

This video demonstrates a few different principles that might come in handy in competition:

1. Gearing down - getting an advantage of force (in this case torque) or distance (in this case speed) 
2. Transferring motion in another direction - getting something to turn on a different way other than the one that is turning

Pay attention to the ideas of a "gain in force" and a "gain in distance."  

How could we use this in our challenges?

Biology and Robotics

Last meeting we talked a little about how biology is being used as a model for building robots. If you think about it, the designs found in nature have been around for millions and billions of years and they are pretty good. In nature, if a design is not working well (often because the environment changes) then that design goes out of production (becomes extinct). What we see in nature today is pretty amazing from a design and technology standpoint. We are only now starting to consider nature's designs as something we should be trying to copy. Check out the videos below to see some good examples of design inspired by nature.




Design inspired by nature

Getting Started

Once you have completed your robot design (chassis) you need to start looking at the missions and creating some programs.

Here are some good tutorials: http://www.stemcentric.com/nxt-tutorial/

These two videos will also help us get started with programming the NXT:

Meeting One Review:

We watched the video below and talked about gearing down.

We handed out this letter which needs to be completed and handed back to Mr. Lavoie.

Good job in almost completing the construction of all the tournament pieces.

In Comments below, tell us what you learned from the mini-lesson about gearing down. Why would anyone want to do this?