VEX Gateway

The 2011/2012 VEX Robotics Competition game Gateway. The object of the game is to attain a higher score than your opponent by picking up colored balls and barrels and placing them in circular goalposts of varying heights. But the gate bars the way from the isolation zone to the interaction zone!

Hawks Claw Their Way to VEX Robotics World Championship

Hawks Claw Their Way to VEX Robotics World Championship at Walt Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex on April 14-16, 2011
2011 VEX Robotics World Championship
Seminole Ridge High freshman Connor Piegaro joined nearly 10,000 middle school, high school and university participants from 16 countries around the world to compete in the action-packed 2011 VEX Robotics World Championship at the Walt Disney World® Resort near Orlando, Florida on April 14-16, 2011. Kari Byron, host of the Discovery Channel’s hit show MYTHBUSTERS and the Science Channel’s HEAD RUSH, emceed as teams from the United States, Canada, China and New Zealand triumphed or got toasted during the intense three-day tournament. This year, almost 600 out of the nearly 4,000 VEX Robotics Competition teams earned the right to bring their robots to the roundup.
Team 1614 Connor Piegaro and Coach Erich Landstrom from Seminole Ridge High
Round Up, the 2010-2011 VEX Robotics Competition Game, is played on a 12’x12’ square field where two alliances composed of two teams each compete against one another. Each match consists of a twenty-second autonomous period where robots are controlled by onboard software, followed by two minutes of human-operated play. The object of the game is to attain a higher score than your opponent alliance by having your robot place round tubes upon goalposts, owning goalposts, and by your robot climbing the ladder in the center of the field and hanging high off the ground.

Erich Landstrom, Seminole SECME school coordinator, points out that Seminole SECME had great success in their inaugural year of VEX Robotics Competitions. Team 1614 from Seminole Ridge won the Miami VEX Round Up Qualifier in October, and finished as finalists at the South Florida Championship in December and the “Mayhem in Miami” in January. Our robots are clearly to be reckoned with, a masterpiece of machined metal, a Cinderella story of circuits and steel at ‘bot ball. All attending teams qualified for the championship after dedicating countless hours to honing their building, programming and strategy skill sets to outperform and outmaneuver others in order to reach the international stage. After a series of intense back-to-back scrimmages, Connor controlled the BBot from Seminole Ridge High to record of four wins, four losses, and one tie during the qualifying rounds, and a ranking of 52nd place.

Landstrom applauds Piegaro’s perseverance and the Hawks hard work: “Giving SECME students the opportunity to work with the VEX robots promotes education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and teaches critical life skills such as teamwork, project management and problem solving. But celebrating National Robotics Week at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex gives the event mainstream recognition similar to that of an international sporting event.”
Team 1614 Connor Piegaro and Coach Erich Landstrom from Seminole Ridge High
Upon arrival, students were showered with confetti from bursting canons, welcomed by stilt walkers, a resident DJ, and entertained by a graffiti artist that painting the town robo-red in honor of the intense competition. The games kicked off on Thursday and continued Friday when teams from around the world poured into the stadium for the opening ceremonies, waving colorful flags from their respective countries and hailed by Mickey and friends. MYTHBUSTERS & HEAD RUSH host Kari Byron joined on Friday night to unveil the 2011/2012 VEX Robotics Competition game Gateway. The object of next year’s game is to attain a higher score than your opponent by picking up colored balls and barrels and placing them in circular goalposts of varying heights. Bryon then served as master of ceremonies to guide teams and spectators through the final award ceremony on the last day of competition.

The VEX Robotics program is in support of The White House's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) initiative to get kids engaged in higher learning, and recently received attention from President Obama who visited a Miami Central High School classroom where he interacted with students excelling in STEM education through VEX Robotics.

BEST Robotics, a middle and high school national robotics program established in 1993, also hosted its second annual national championship alongside the VEX Robotics World Championship. The Boy Scouts of America were on hand to award some of the first Robotics Merit Badges to more than 25 deserving scouts. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy AROW hosted its water robotics competition.

Presenting co-sponsors of the 2011 VEX Robotics Competition World Championship include Autodesk Inc., NASA, EMC Corporation, and the FUTURE Foundation. Additional supporting partners include Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation, Microchip, Intelitek, Robotics Academy at Carnegie Mellon University, the CREATE Foundation and Northrop Grumman.

DiBiFiLiTi@25

The South Florida Science Museum and the Florida Engineering Society held the 25th annual engineering competition ‘Drop It, Build It, Fly It, Launch It, Thrill It’ on Saturday, April 16, 2011.

Di-Bi-Fi-Li-Ti is a design competition for cash prizes that challenges kids. Middle and high school students are invited to participate in the competition that enables them to learn about and use engineering principles through five design contests: build an unbreakable bridge, create a container protecting an egg in a three-story drop, fly the furthest flung paper airplane, launch a model rocket with longest time aloft, and construct a model roller coaster with a thrilling theme.

SRHS students showcased their skills, and congratulations are in order! SRHS SECME (Science, Engineering, Communication and Math Excellence) coaches Erich Landstrom and Ed Batchelor applaud the award winning performance of:

• Thrill It, First Place and $200: seniors Mark Blanar and Joe Pavicic for their “Collision Course” coaster, with a time of 28 sec


• Thrill It, Second Place and $100: freshmen Sam Smith and Cody Summerlin for their “Flight of the Bumblebee” coaster, with a time of 29.7 sec


• Drop it, Third Place and $50: senior Arnold Banner, with a 21.5 gram chicken egg container.

Towards the Perfect Paper Plane

Iterative Design: Towards the Perfect Paper Plane

Aza Raskin: I’ve been on a quest for the last 16 years. It hasn’t been a constant quest, nor a particularly important one. Just one close to my heart: to design a paper airplane perfectly suited for duration flights.

What’s the moral of the story? As you design, you aren’t just moving towards a solution, you are learning about what problem your solution is trying to solve. So, don’t stop iterating your design. And more importantly, don’t stop iterating your problem.

Hawks Power Up for VEX Robotics World Championship

Hawks Power Up for VEX Robotics World Championship at Walt Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex on April 14-16, 2011

Seminole Ridge High freshman Connor Piegaro will join nearly 10,000 middle school, high school and university participants from 16 countries around the world to compete in the action-packed 2011 VEX Robotics World Championship at the Walt Disney World® Resort near Orlando, Florida on April 14-16, 2011.

Round Up, the 2010-2011 VEX Robotics Competition Game, is played on a 12’x12’ square field where two alliances composed of two teams each compete against one another. Each match consists of a twenty-second autonomous period where robots are controlled by onboard software, followed by two minutes of human-operated play. The object of the game is to attain a higher score than your opponent alliance by having your robot place round tubes upon goalposts, owning goalposts, and by your robot climbing the ladder in the center of the field and hanging high off the ground.

Erich Landstrom, Seminole SECME school coordinator, points out that Seminole SECME had great success in their inaugural year of VEX Robotics Competitions. The Hawks won the Miami VEX Round Up Qualifier in October, and finished second at the South Florida Championship in December and the “Mayhem in Miami” in January. This tournament’s trip to the playoffs shows that our robots are clearly to be reckoned with, a Cinderella story of circuits and steel at bot ball. Landstrom is very proud of the Hawks hard work. “Giving SECME students the opportunity to work with the VEX robots promotes education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and teaches critical life skills such as teamwork, project management and problem solving. But celebrating National Robotics Week at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex gives the event mainstream recognition similar to that of an international sporting event.”

This year, almost 600 out of the nearly 4,000 VEX Robotics Competition teams have earned the right to bring their robotic masterpieces to the “Happiest Place on Earth” where they will form strategic alliances with other teams and challenge their toughest competitors playing the game Round Up. All attending teams qualified for the tournament after dedicating countless hours to honing their building, programming and strategy skill sets to outperform others in order to reach the international stage.

Drop It, Build It, Fly It, Launch It, Thrill It April 16th event

Who: elementary, middle, and high school students

What: 25th anniversary of the annual Drop It, Build It, Fly It, Launch It, Thrill It competition

When: Saturday April 16th

Where: South Florida Science Museum

Why: Students have the opportunity to compete for over $3,500 in cash and prizes

Fee: free to enter the contest & museum admission will be ½ price that day

Local vendors, Colleges & Universities will be in attendance.

It’s not too late to register and we look forward to you taking part in the event.

Details are located: http://www.sfsm.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=events.details&content_id=19

How Safe Is Safe Enough? To Engineers, It Depends

How Safe Is Safe Enough? To Engineers, It Depends
by Joe Palca

Apr 5, 2011 (All Things Considered) — "Safe" isn't a defined engineering term. Planners must decide, based on risks and probabilities, how safe they want to make something -- whether it's an airplane, bridge, or nuclear power plant. But sometimes it's hard to estimate exactly what the likelihood of a particular calamity might be.

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No one likes things to break. We don't like holes to appear in airplane cabins unexpectedly; we don't like bridges to collapse; we don't like radioactivity to leak from nuclear power plants. But engineers have to design things to certain specifications, and they have to grapple with the question of how safe is safe enough.

When humans first started building things, determining whether they would work as planned was mostly a matter of trial and error. Build a bridge, drive a chariot across it, and see if it collapsed.

"And it really wasn't until the Renaissance, until Galileo, that there was what we could today call a rational approach to design through calculation," says Henry Petroski, a professor of engineering at Duke University.

He says computers and mathematical models now can predict how a bridge will behave under different conditions. But he says if you ask engineers to build a safe bridge or a safe nuclear plant, they ask you what you mean by that.

"The definition of safe is not strictly an engineering term; it's a societal term," he says. "Does it mean absolutely no loss of life? Does it mean absolutely no contamination with radiation? What exactly does safe mean?"

Once you settle that question, engineers still face the problem of deciding how to achieve whatever level of safety they are aiming for.

Michael Corradini, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin, says first, engineers design for normal operating conditions. "Then with any engineering design, anything at all, you say, 'That's fine, that's what it operates on. But what if something happens that it experiences some unusual conditions?' "

So for example, let's says you're designing a bridge for a place where gale force winds and heavy snows are virtually unheard of.

"You still design for it so that the bridge safely performs its function," Corradini says. "Or if it fails, it fails gently, so there are no catastrophic effects." In other words, the bridge doesn't collapse.

Engineering For All Conditions

But what about other kinds of safety threats? How well will a bridge do if terrorists try to blow it up? What happens if operators in a nuclear power plant control room suddenly get sick? What if a meteorite falls on the plant?

Corradini says nuclear power plant designers try to think of everything.

"They have a listing of all the things they think can go wrong and how they can go wrong, and some sort of ordered list of which is more likely than others," he says.

And the possibility of a meteorite isn't a joke: "It's there somewhere — it's just a very low probability," Corradini says.

But sometimes, when you set out to build a nuclear power plant, you don't know exactly what the likelihood of a particular calamity might be.

"When we plan something, we always make assumptions," says Yotaro Hatamura, an emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo. He says engineers sometimes don't pay enough attention to history in making their assumptions.

Hatamura favors what he calls "backward thinking" — looking at a previous step in the process to see if it worked properly. For example: The reactor core might survive an earthquake, but what about the pumps that provide cooling water to the reactor? Or what about the backup generators that provide emergency power to the pumps? Or what about the fuel supply for the emergency generators?

He says accidents happen when engineers don't constantly test and revise the assumptions they've made about all the things that a nuclear plant needs to operate. Hatamura says it's not always easy to look back and admit to problems that you should have thought of in the first place.

"We don't see what we don't want to see. We don't want to think about scary things," he says. "That's just human nature."

Source: NPR
Copyright(c) 2011, NPR

Smart Bridges

Can we engineer bridges that tell us what's wrong with them before it's too late?


Program Description
After the Minneapolis Interstate 35 bridge collapsed in 2007, millions became nervous about crossing long highway spans. What can be done to avert the next catastrophe? One technique probes bridge supports with ultrasonic sound waves, searching for "sour notes" that signal damaged metal, while another uses nanotechnology to create a coating that detects structural damage beneath its surface.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA scienceNOW.