Tech Camp

Okay - I have a whole slew of pics that need to be blogged about. Perhaps I'll catch up tonight!

First up, EJ went to technology camp at her school a few weeks ago. There were supposed to be three classes - video game design from 9-11, robotics from 12-2, and simulations from 3-5. Unfortunately, the third class was cancelled since not enough kids signed up, but she really enjoyed the first two classes, despite being the only girl there. The camp was for kids ages 8-12 and was taught by the middle school technology teachers, so it was nice for her to meet some of her future teachers a little bit early!

For game design, they created characters and then did small programs where they blasted things or worked their way through a maze. She used a program called Scratch, which looks pretty interesting. She received a copy of it as a take-home from the class and has been playing with it a lot this week.

For robotics, they use the Legos MindStorm system. The teacher said that the only goal for their robot was to move an object from point A to point B. He didn't care how they did it. EJ's team's robot is shown below. The tall section in the middle has a conveyor belt on it that you drop blocks onto. There was a little visual scanner (has a cable coming from it on the top), and it scanned the blocks to see if they were blue or red. The red blocks sorted fine, but the scanner didn't seem to be able to detect the blue ones! Anyway, the blue blocks went onto a catapult to be launched (on voice commands!), and the red blocks were loaded onto a truck, which had a weight sensor in it. When it had enough weight, the truck drove away. Very clever.