Wrapping up Phase One

We are very close to finishing our Phase One tasks. As of this afternoon we have an edited video; I'm going to wait a day or two to officially upload it to the Moonbots site so we can consider whether it needs tweaking. We're pretty happy with it overall.

And we have a photostream at Flickr with some shots of the kids working on the video. If we make it to Phase Two, we can post our work here as we progress.

The deadline for our Phase 1 entry is this weekend, and we'll know whether we made it to Phase 2 on August 1. Almost 70 teams have registered; there's no telling how many of them will complete Phase 1 entries by the deadline. 30 teams will progress. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

The Proud Coach Gushes

I'm so impressed with the team and the work they're doing. I haven't done anything like this before and wasn't sure how much I'd have to drive things, but they have really taken on the project. They are full of good ideas for our landscape, for the video, for the robot they hope to build.

We're working on the video today. We won't have time to edit it before MoonBots Mini-Camp ends, but we will get all our footage, and we'll edit it when I get back from my trip. Brenden will be at camp that week, but we've talked about how we want the video structured and he's fine with us finishing it up without him.

Brenden is a natural at talking on camera. He can extemporize things like, "We would like to leave a robot on the moon that could travel and take pictures and video that we could see on Earth. This would be useful because less than 5% of the moon's surface has been explored." When we came across that fact in our research yesterday, he immediately grasped it as a hook for talking about the project. I'd also spotted it as something useful we could use in our video, but he didn't need me to point it out to him.

Meanwhile, Mitchal has a terrific grasp of the vocabulary of filmmaking. He has been full of ideas for how the film should be structured, and it's going to be great, with an intro where the boys introduce themselves, then title screens with information about the team, our project, and the MoonBots challenge, and then footage of them describing their project. Mitchal even had an idea for the music to play behind the title sequence.

It's been a fun mini-camp. I think we all have enjoyed it, though the team wasn't too thrilled with the part of the day yesterday where we read up on moon-related research and science:

Me: Kid 1, are you paying attention?

Kid 1: Yes. It's just that I don't like school.

Me: This isn't school.

Kid 2: No. It just feels like it.

Me, thinking: I can just call your moms and send you home anytime, you little ingrates.

I hope they at least recognize that they got useful information from our Review of Moon Science and Lore. I can see that they did!

That was our only glitch. It's been terrific otherwise.

I was just chatting with Mitchal's mom and saying that we may not make it to Phase 2, but we have really done our best. And our best is pretty darn good. I'm really proud of the team.

In Phase 2, we will have to create a to-scale design for our landscape, and then build the landscape and have our robot navigate it within certain parameters. The robot will have to start from a base, climb a ridge 6 inches high, and collect objects from the other side. These could represent water ice, heritage artifacts (I suggest astronaut pee bags but the team probably won't go for it), power cells, or anything that could be harvested on the moon. Then the robot has to return over the ridge with what it has collected, and touch the starting base to complete the mission.

Eric and I have done some similar projects, using a book called The Mayan Adventure, though nothing this ambitious. So we have some experience with thinking through our design and program, testing, and de-bugging.

If we don't make it to Phase 2, we're going to do something anyway. We might go ahead and do the Phase 2 challenge, or we might choose a different project. Last year, a friend gave me the materials for a First Lego League team one of her sons had been on, and we could set that up and do the challenges from it. Or we could do something else. We have lots of options.

We'll do something, though. The team is enthusiastic, full of good ideas, and eager to get into the nitty-gritty of building and programming. It would be lovely to make it to Phase 2 and get a brand-new Mindstorms 2.0 set, 25 Lego baseplates, a Dexter Industries solar power cell for Mindstorms, and a chunk of money to buy supplies. But that's not necessary. I hung out on eBay a lot earlier this year and managed to get some good deals, so we have three Mindstorms sets already, and more than plenty of bricks and pieces.

And goodness knows, the team has plenty of ideas. And if they run out, I have one or two books they can browse through for inspiration.

 

What To Leave on the Moon--And What To Take Away

Today we revised our drafts of the two questions we have to answer in writing, describing the landscape we're building and talking about where we'll do our public display. The team hopes we can do a public event at Impression 5 Science Museum here in Lansing. They wrote:

Impression 5 is a hands on public science museum. We are going to try do our live performance there. A lot of people will be at Impression 5 so we want to do our demonstration there. It is local to the Lansing area. We all love impression 5, and they have classrooms that we can use. Plus lots of public and home schoolers will be there and we could publicize the event on Facebook and our blog to reach people who would be interested in seeing our robot and trying it out.

We spent some time talking about the moon: how it was made, what it's made of, how it influences the tides. We talked about the confirmation a few years ago that there is water ice on the moon, in places that are constantly in darkness. Solar radiation makes water on the surface disperse into space through a process called photodissolution. None of us knew that before; now we do. We noticed the word is made up of "photo," which means like, and "dissolve," which means to dissipate.

We learned about why there are mare on the face of the moon we see, but hardly any on the other side (it has to do, the theory goes, with the concentration of heat-producing elements). We went through that just to make sure the team was up-to-date on basic moon facts and background, and interesting current questions like whether there is enough water on the moon to support lunar colonization.

My work for the day is pretty much done. After the afternoon snack break, I just have to make sure they know how to use the video camera, and talk with them a little about the content of their video, and then they can work on that. If they can get filming done today, we'll have time to edit tomorrow. That will be an adventure because I don't think any of us have done it before. The team has to choose one of four questions to talk about in their video. They chose, "When you go to the moon, what would you leave on the moon and why?" They have a lot of ideas about leaving behind a scientific robot.

If I were making my own movie, I'd choose, "What do you think should happen to the heritage artifacts already on the moon?" because I learned today in the course of our exploration that among those heritage artifacts are the astronauts' urine bags. I'd like to propose that we collect those and bring them back. My scientific rationale would be that we could study the urine for hints about the effects on the body of low gravity. But mostly I'm just amused by the thought of Pee Bags From The Moon. Here is what we wrote about the landscape we'd like to build. I typed this from their ideas and dictation.

We looked at a lot of pictures taken on the moon as we were thinking about how to do our landscape. We would like our lunar landscape to be realistic and rocky, with craters and even craters-in-craters. We saw a picture of a mountain range on the moon that gave us ideas for the plateau we have to include in our landscape for the challenge. There are large flat seas on the moon where molten rock flowed and cooled, and the main part of our landscape may be kind of like that so our robot can maneuver more easily. We plan to make a backdrop for our landscape that will show the earth in the moon's sky. 

We like to build with Legos and hope to use them for some of the features of our landscape. We are only wondering if we can find enough gray bricks! But Mitchal also knows how to make a mix of sand, glue, and water, that can be poured and molded. We think this mix could make a very real-looking moon surface and will probably incorporate it into our design as well. Although we are planning to use treads on our robot, and think that will help with traction, we also think the sand mix will make a nice surface for our robot to drive on.

MoonBots Mini-Camp

We are spending three days at Coach Su's house. We call this time together "MoonBots Mini-Camp," and we are hoping to finish Phase I--our team registration and proposal--by the time we're done. Today we made team t-shirts and took our team photo, drafted our individual and team biographies, and thought about what our lunar landscape might look like and where we might do a public display of our robot and landscape. Doing a public demonstration is one of the requirements if we make it to Phase II. Thanks to Elayne for helping with the t-shirts. And by "helping" we mean "doing them." The official team photo came out great:

But there were some shenanigans on the way to getting a useable pose: