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