Earthdate: Friday, August 19th

That’s it! We’ve gotten everything submitted. Now it’s up to the judges. Whatever happens, we’ve had a great summer!  We got to have fun with like-minded kids, and introduce Moonbots to our community. We opened the eyes of some kids with our outreach project. They thought that science was just a school subject. We showed them that science is fun and anybody can “do science”.

We got to practice our engineering and programming skills in designing our robot (several times over...) and figuring out the best way to get the mission done.

We never showed y’all our shirts.  We think they’re cool.  Here’s what it says on the back:



We’ll see you next year in Moonbots 3.0!

Earthdate: Wednesday, August 17th

We finished the CAD version of our robot, and uploaded it to our website.  The file can be downloaded from the CAD Design page. If you build it, we’d love to hear about your experiences with running it and any improvements you made to it.

Earthdate: Tuesday, August 16th

We had our live mission event this afternoon.  We ran into a few glitches (and the wall...) but it was a good experience. We’re happy that our robot didn’t fall on its face during the dismount from the landing base (that’s happened before...).  Now we need to finish up the digital design by the end of the week, and we’ll be done. It was a great day!

We wish the teams that are still awaiting their turn at the live mission the best of luck!

Earthdate: Monday, August 15th

We worked this afternoon to make some final changes to the programming.  Our robot can do all of the tasks, it’s just a matter of stringing them all together into a successful run.  We’ve gained a new appreciation for the difficulties that are involved in sending a robot off to the moon to accomplish tasks, and now know firsthand how the Mars rover Spirit got stuck spinning its wheels. Our robot can sympathize.  We’re hoping for good luck tomorrow during our final mission judging.

Here are some pictures from the past week:

Earthdate: Wednesday, August 10th

We worked on our robot some more.  We’re running into weight balance problems. Here are a couple of videos to show you what happens when the robot is side heavy.

 

Or front heavy:

 

But we have had some success:

 

We’re getting there!

Earthdate: Saturday, August 6th

We had our outreach project at AMSE today! It was great!  We had a lot of people come through and participate in our Lunar Exploration activities. The most popular was probably the experiment showing rocket propulsion basics using a balloon on a string.  You can see more details on our outreach program here.

Earthdate: Friday, August 5th

Our outreach project at the AMSE is tomorrow, and we think we’ve got everything set. We’re getting some good press in our local paper and from the museum.  This is going to be fun!

Earthdate: Wednesday, August 3rd

Trouble! Our robot won’t turn.  The base of the robot is too wide, and when one wheel tries to turn the robot, it just spins on its own. We’re changing the design to use the tracks, and will need to change our CAD design to match.

Earthdate: Sunday, July 31st

We built the board today.  We don’t have everything Velcroed down but we will do that next time. We also attached the camera. We built a basket for it at the side of the robot, but found out that that threw the robot off balance when it was going over the crater ridges. So we moved it to the center of the robot, but now the robot can’t go over the crater ridge every time.  We think it’s the weight that we’ve added. We may need to redesign (again)...

We talked about our outreach event this coming Saturday. We’re getting the stuff ready for the experiments we’ll have museum visitors do.

Earthdate: Monday, July 25th

We used Lego Digital Designer to make our robot design.  We got our feet wet last year in MoonBots 1.0, but haven’t played with it since then.  It takes a steady hand (and some of our math skills!) to get everything lined up right.

Earthdate: Sunday, July 24th

We worked on the robot design some more this evening.  We found out that the craters are a lot easier to get into than to get out of. But now we can get out of them too!  Our next challenge is to figure out how/where to attach the camera.

Earthdate: Friday, July 22nd

We discussed the outreach activity today.  The AMSE is letting us put together some experiments/activities for their visitors. We’ll have to get the materials together.  We also worked on the robot some more. We built a prototype of the harvesting fork. We now realize that the size of the water ice and helium 3 elements mean that our robot won’t be able to hold all of them on the fork.  We’ll have to either take them back to the landing ramp, or put them on the robot somewhere.

Earthdate: Wednesday, July 20th

We got our robot to go over the crater ridge!  It took several prototypes, but we have success!  Now we need to work on the harvesting activity so it has something to do when it gets to the other side.

We also have nailed down the date for our outreach project.  The American Museum of Science and Energy has graciously offered the use of their facilities (and their museum visitors) for our use. We’re very excited to share our love of science activities and experiments with other kids.  Wouldn’t it be something to know that we started some future astronauts on their path of space exploration??

Earthdate: Sunday, July 17th

We built the game board elements today.  We’re missing some plates for the Eternal Peak of Light and a couple of axles for the water ice elements, but we got everything else built.  Here’s a video:

 

We’re hoping the MoonBots folks will send the missing parts so we can keep going.

Earthdate: Friday, July 15th

Our LEGO kits arrived today! The box they came in was a bit damaged, so we’re hoping that everything is in there.  Now we get to start building!

Earthdate: Monday, July 11th

We met today to talk about everything that we need to do in phase 2. We can’t wait to get the kits, and keep looking for them to show up.  Until then, we’re focusing on our outreach project to see how far along we can go in the planning for that before we need to focus on the robot and mission planning.  So exciting!

Earthdate: Tuesday, July 5th

We made it to phase 2! We’re very excited!  Congratulations to all the teams in phase 1, whether they were named finalists or not.  We’ve spent the past week looking at the other teams’ videos, and were very impressed.

Earthdate: Sunday, June 26th

We have everything submitted!  Now we just have to sit and wait...

Earthdate: Saturday, June 25th

We have finished our video essay.  We met several times over the past couple of weeks to shoot different segments of it.  It was a lot of fun to put together.  Now we just need to get it uploaded onto YouTube.  We’re in the home stretch!

Earthdate: Friday, June 24th

We put the final touches on our robot design.  We researched the lunar terrain and took that into account when deciding what features would be important for a rover to have there.

Earthdate: Tuesday, June 14th

We started work on our video today!  It’s a lot of fun to shoot it!  We’re going to have trouble getting all of our ideas into 4 minutes. Maybe if we talk really fast?

Earthdate: Saturday, June 11th

We got together this afternoon to talk about our video and written proposal. We discussed what we knew, and what areas of lunar exploration we were fuzzy on, and searched for information on the internet to fill in some gaps. There’s a lot to take into account when designing a robot that can operate on the moon!

Earthdate: Monday, June 6th

All three of us are Safety Patrol members, and we got to participate in a field trip to Washington, DC over the weekend.  One of the highlights of the trip was a stop at the Udvar-Hazy Center, where we got to see the Enterprise Space Shuttle on display!  We also had 16 hours on the bus there and back which we used to talk about our plans for our MoonBots video.

[Home] [Our Team] [Our Blog] [Our Proposal] [Our Video] [CAD Design] [Outreach] [Live Mission] [Links]