Merry Christmas

Our robot has gotten a Christmas hat!
He is very excited that we are going to be continuing to do robotics for the next competition, since the TRC placed first.

If you don't celebrate Christmas, than happy Hanukkah, Yule, Winter Solis's, Soyal, or what other holiday you might celebrate.

Also, I put a Christmas hat and stuff on the Trash Trek logo.

So marry Christmas and stuff. We should be getting back to Mindstorm and programming the missions again pretty soon, and you should expect some more tweets and blog posts from us.

See you in a bit. :)

The Mindstorm Trash Trek Competition

Yesterday, TRC went to the Mindstorm Competition. (12/12/2015)

We got there a bit early, and got to explore the school a bit.  The event was hosted by Hamilton Middle School in Houston.  They have a very nice school and since we don't get a chance to see a lot of schools it was interesting to see what regular public school kids experience.  One thing that was interesting was that everyone at a public school gets a locker to store their books and jackets.  I thought they just had keys or something, but apparently they have a padlock which you can spin. I wanted to open a locker but that wasn't allowed.  The organizers did a very good job setting everything up and the robot competition area had big screens for the scores and things.  My Dad had to help them a little bit with getting the team scores displayed and later had to help them with judging but everything else went very smoothly.

So we went back to our table, where we had placed our robot Boggle, and our skit notes and stuff. So we officially started the day with some pictures with our fezzes and bowties, and then with some very official TRC doodles. (One page can be seen on our Twitter account, and me and Taryn's awesome bowties and fezzes. )

Then, everyone but my mother, who stayed behind to guard our table, set off to go see the people in the other building. We saw lot's of cool teams and robots, and several people took pictures with us because they were Whovians and liked our bowties and fezzes. We also saw some people with cool pizza hats.

Since robot competition wasn't coming for awhile and everything was behind schedule we went and did our skit. It went pretty well, and everyone remembered their lines but Aiden put his trash bag costume on upside down. Apparently, what we thought was the "head" hole was actually the leg hole. It didn't fall off, however, and it worked very well.

When we came back it was almost our turn, and I drew a bit more, and Tegan turned on the robot so it'd be fully on when she and Aiden (our board people) got on the board. When they got on, the only thing that went wrong was that the squid didn't get pushed into the circle, but the chicken and turtle were in a circle. We got 417 points! :)  .

We were currently in first place. We were quite a bit a head of the other competitors at this point, the closest was 345 points so we were pretty confident with our first run.  We waited a bit longer a the table, and our next round was a while away, so we decided to go and do the Robot Judging. We apparently were the only ones so far to have given a book with all the programming/engineering book. Taryn and Aiden did most of the talking, Taryn explaining the programming and Aiden explaining the arms and what missions they were used in and how.

We came back to our table, and then we waited a little longer (while drawing in between so we wouldn't be bored.) and then it was our second round, so Aiden and Tegan went onto the table with our robot. This time, everything worked well, and we got 451 points, still in first place.  At this point my Dad went to help with robot judging because the competition was way behind and he knows a lot about engineering and programming plus it was pretty clear that we were going to win because we had seen everyone else's robots perform.

Since there was nothing else to do, and our third round was happening in probably an hour or so, we stayed at the table and had our picture taken twice after, and drew a lot. I made a little squad of big cats, a king cheetah called Speedy C (or, I just wrote down Speed.), a panther called Scratch, a tiger called Snarl, and a lion called Spear. Me and Tegan drew them a lot. We were very good at drawing them.

After we drew all over five pieces of paper and three smaller pieces of paper, it was finally our third round again. However, it didn't go as well. A motor had gotten unplugged and died, the plug probably had gotten tugged out or just slipped out when we put it into the box. Almost none of the missions worked, but luckily, we were judged based on our highest score (451 points) and we got to get two trophies!

One was for Overall, which meant we did pretty good in Robot Judging, skit, and robot performance, and we got third place in it.

And then we got a first place trophy for Robot Performance! :) We got a "golden ticket" and we'll be going to the next robot competition. We are planning on adding another mission, and Taryn thinks she'll try and add the "engine"  mission in which you put the engine in the car.

So, you haven't heard the last of the TRC and more blog posts and tweets should be expected.
Good bye for now! :)

Our youtube channel!

Hello! Recently, our couch/father helped us set up our awesome YouTube account.
We've posted four videos already, and if you'd like to watch them, you can find it here. <- it's a link


All of our missions are complete and running smoothly. We have a couple videos of the missions on our channel already.

We have our two engineers Tegan and Aiden up on the board this year, because their a very good team. They work very quickly, but we're practicing every hour and half so they can do it faster. We want to have a bit of time left just in case there's some trouble putting on an arm or something.

Here's the missions we've uploaded -we are missing two which should be posted later; Careers and Demolition.

Purchasing Decisions

Truck Mission

Clean Up Mission

Our Updated Skit!!!

Skit of America and Canada v1.0

CHARACTERS:

MERICA –RED                  CANADA –BLUE          CA$H/MONEY –GREEN                                TRASH -BROWN

(Trash is hugging America.)

MERICA: … (Tries to push away Trash)

TRASH: (Hugs tighter)

MERICA: …Canada! Do you see this??

CANADA: (Was talking to Money. Looks away.) Yes, America I do.

MERICA: Trash is so annoying! It’s polluting my environment and killing my animals and people. I can’t get anyone to recycle and all they do is make dumps! They don’t even help!

CANADA: Yes…The dumps do tend to leak, and they make so many dangerous gases. I heard that one of the eleven toxic gases they produce is Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas contributing to global warming… and that’s very dangerous.

MERICA: I know. I need to get rid of at least some of this garbage before I am over run!

CANADA: Have you tried recycling? It works quite well for me. 93% of my population recycles and Two-thirds of the increase in waste generation between 2000 and 2004 was offset by increased recycling,

MERICA: Yes, we do have a recycling option but few people use it. Some people are really good at recycling but the majority are just not interested or find it too time consuming. How do you make yours so successful?

CANADA: It’s simple…money!!

CASH: You mean me!

MERICA: Wait, Money… Recycling?  I don’t see the connection.

CASH: Well, everyone wants to either make money or keep the money they have. Even if it’s, say, ten cents, people still want it.

MERICA: So how does it work?

CANADA: We give people money for recycling and charge people if they create too much garbage.

MERICA: I don’t understand. (ow_

TRASH: (Gasps and hugs Merica tighter.) Give me a break… that’s way too much work… no one will ever do it!  It’s so much easier to throw things into convenient dumps!

MERICA: (Tries to push Trash away again.)

CANADA: Here’s an example…When I sell cans of soda, I charge a small deposit for each can. People drink their soda and when they are finished, they turn in the cans to a recycling plant –

CASH: Then they get ten cents of ME!!!

CANADA: Yes. You get ten cents for glass bottles, beer bottles, soda cans, water bottles, or wine bottles. For some people, the ten cents doesn’t matter. But to other people, it does. You can barely find a discarded bottle or can in Canada. It allows an easy way to make some cash if you are willing to put in some effort. People get some money and the environment gets clean with a lot less litter and items going into the dump.

TRASH: (Gasps in horror.) That’s terrible!

MERICA: Not to the environment.

CANADA: We have this recycling option for everything that can be recycled. The only requirement is that they are sorted before they are sent in. Due to this program, we save over 25,000 trees a year,

CASH: But you know what really motivates people?

MERICA: What?

MONEY: Losing me.

CANADA: In my country, we encourage people to recycle. Recycling is free, but throwing out trash for dumps is not. If you have more than two trash bags of trash per household, then you have to pay.

CASH: It works very well in Canada. In America, only 58 percent of households recycle. In Canada, 93 percent of households recycle.

CANADA: Yes, this program has worked very well for me and has been very effective in helping the environment. It also creates a lot of positive rewards as people work together and help the environment and can help other people as well.

CANADA: Plus our expert from Waste Management systems in Texas felt that this program would be possible to implement in your country as well.

AMERICA: Thanks Canada…That is a great idea.

TRASH: NOOOOOOOOOOO

Our Skit

We finally finished the final draft of our skit yesterday! We thought that we’d post our idea here so other people could use some of the information for their own skit.

Since the theme was to make an idea about how we could deal with trash, we decided to go see what Canada was doing. Our mother was born in Canada, and she told us once about the recycling program that Canada had when she was a child, so we thought that’d we'd go and see how it had worked/ is working and to see if they even used the same program.

It turned out that they do, and we learned that it was a very helpful program. Our second engineer and researcher, Tegan, looked up why it worked, and we found that it worked because it was using the two things that most motivated people: losing and gaining money.

The reason money motivates people is because if you don’t have money, you likely don’t have very much. Without money, you can’t buy food, water, a house, clothing, or pay the taxes you need to keep a house. Without money you can’t afford to feed your family, or have pets, or have a car. Without money, you can’t take a vacation, afford tickets to concerts or plays, or afford many activities.

So, many people view money as very important, and rightly so. For people who don’t have much money, they tend to try and get it whenever the option comes up. And for basically everyone…no one wants to lose money, unless their buying something that would benefit them.

In Canada, they use this to their advantage. Their program works very well, and because of it, 93% of their population recycles, which is huge, compared to America’s 53% of people recycling.

If you take an empty can of soda, an empty beer bottle, water bottle, soup can, or any other type of can or bottle, than you get ten cents. To some people, that ten cents doesn’t matter; they have enough money already and ten cents doesn’t seem very important. However, to some people, ten cents adds up and can be very helpful.

It’s very rare to find a can or bottle anywhere in Canada, because if anyone else sees it first, it’s very likely that they’ll go and grab it so they can turn it in later. The only place you might find a can or bottle are in dumpsters, and people go as far as going “Dumpster Diving” just to see if they can find a can or bottle to turn in.

This is a very helpful program, to people and the environment alike. Using this program alone, a girl named Sonila Ranaweera managed to collect 46,000 pounds of recycables  and turn them in, earning 46,000 dollars to donate to different charities.

The other program they have relies on taking money. In Canada, you can only have two bags of trash. Recycling is free and they will take your bags of recalls no matter what, but if you too many trash bags, they will leave them. This encourages people to recycle as much as they possibly can.

If you want your extra trash bags to be taken, you have to pay a fee by buying a special tag that lets the garbage people know that you paid a fee for it and it is allowed to be taken to the dump.

We figured it was an interesting idea, and it’s obviously a good one. I hope this helps you with your skit or project. J

Interview with Taryn about the importance of tracking success and failure

Taryn decided to do start marking the board with stickers to show where Boggle, our fav robot, stopped, to check its accuracy and consistency when completing missions.

This is really important to determine your probability of success for each of your missions.  We try and target 90% to consider a mission reliable.  We run each of the missions at least ten times and record our successes and types of failures.  We usually don't start recording our missions until we think they're ready because each time we make a change we have to start our record keeping over.

I had a pretend interview with her, using an awesome microphone I made from some paper and a pencil, and she explained why she was using this new method and how it worked. :)

The Demolition Mission

Our awesome enigerneer Taryn finished the Demolition Mission, and did an awesome job! It works very well,  and the box that Tegan made is a perfect fit to catch it. (If you want a closer picture of the box, you can look at our Twitter account. )

Since that mission is finished now, she's started working on the Scrap Car, and Compost and has been making great progress on them. :)

The multi -plexer!

Our engineer Aiden got to stay home while me and my sisters went to a 4H meeting, and while he was home he constructed this awesome gadget to help do the Sorting Mission. We think it's going to be really useful when we do the mission.

We just had Aiden explain it in a short and brief fashion, but he did a good job. If you didn't quite catch it, the Multi -Pexler is just a little thing made to help move two things with one motor, and for example, if you added it on, it would be able to move two arms.

If you make the one on the right move, it makes the right arm move. If you make the one of the left move, than the left arm moves. It's pretty simple but really hard to make and we are all very proud that Aiden managed to put it together!

The Clean Up Mission

You may have seen our Twitter post about the Clean Up Mission, but I guess Twitter only allows 20 second videos. The video was. 35 seconds and had a bit cut off.
So here's the full mission. Enjoy! (P.S, sorry about the background. We got an unexpected guest, it appears.)

Hello there

This is the Tardis Repair Company blog! We are a home school family team competing in the FLL (First Lego League.) . There are four of us, and we are all siblings and we are coached by our totally awesome and smart father. We've been doing Lego Mindstorm for the last two years, and last year we came in second in our Area Competition and we're hoping to do even better this year.

Our first year we were called Welcome to the Dark Side, We have Cookies. (Or for short, the "Dark Side."). Last year we were the Tardis Repair Company, named after our undying love for Doctor Who. (Personally, I figured we should change it to K9 Catchers this year, and we could wear some awesome K9 shoes we had but I was voted against. :( Luckily Tardis Repair Company is an awesome name anyways. )

We've been starting on the 2015 Trash Trek Missions for about two-three weeks before I managed to get this blog up and running. What we've been working on is the Clean Up mission, and our awesome programmer (my big sister Taryn) has made a bunch of progress on it. :)

Our two engineers (My big brother Aiden and little sister Tegan) made a super cool arm for the robot and a smaller arm on the back too.

I'm the assistant programmer and I get to help Taryn, but I also make the blog, which I did last year as well, and I also do Twitter for the team as well. Our twitter goal for this year is to get at least ten followers in the next week or two.

Here's a link to our Twitter account if you'd like to check it out.
https://twitter.com/tardisrepair1
It would mean a lot to us if you'd follow us.

That's all I have to say right now! Have a good day and good -bye.