FLL Educator Workshop

Last Saturday at the FIRST Lego League Educator Workshop at Joe Walker Middle School, PHI Robotics team members helped local educators build their own Lego robots and learn about how to get started with FLL.

After a morning of presentations by Eagle Robotics on how to run a FLL team, workshop attendees constructed their 'bots from Lego parts and NXT brains.  Then, they programmed their robots to complete a challenge similar to the one assigned to FLL teams each robotics year.  By the end of the day, these new Lego coaches and mentors had gained valuable firsthand experience to share with their teams about how to build a robot.

We had a lot of fun partnering with the NASA AERO Institute and Eagle Robotics on this workshop.  If you'd like our support with other workshops and events, email us at phirobotics@yahoo.com, and we'll see what we can do!

Workshop attendees learn about robotics.

A PHI team member ponders on how to build a Lego robot.

Local educators watch their robot in action.

Summer Outreach

As a creative summer outreach project, this month our team gave several hour-long robotics presentations for about 20 kids from K-6th grade at the Quartz Hill YMCA Childcare Center.

We taught the children about robots and played a game about basic programming.  With the older kids, we discussed FIRST Lego League, and explained how they could join a team, while the younger kids had fun drawing imaginary robots and looking at robot books.  The finale was a lively game of Simon Says, featuring the guest appearance of Goldie the robot (a human in a friendly robot costume.)

We enjoyed teaching the children about robotics and leading them in fun activities, and we hope to partner with the YMCA Childcare Center for more events like this in the future!  If you'd like us to give a similar event at your school or community center, you can email us at phirobotics@yahoo.com.

PHI team members show off our robot.

A team member picks volunteers for a fun activity.

Goldie joins a game of Simon Says.

Summer Robotics Workshop

This past week, we partnered with several other local robotics teams as well as NASA and Lockheed Martin to host a week-long robotics workshop for sixty elementary- and middle-schoolers.  We had a great time doing a variety of activities, from throwing water balloons to teaching kids to build robots.

During the week, the kids got to participate in science activities including launching balloon rockets and building a protective "spacecraft" to safely land an egg launched by a slingshot.  Each afternoon, the kids worked in teams of six to build robots out of VEX metal parts to play a game involving racquetballs.  On Saturday, parents got to see all the teams play in an exciting competition very similar to the FIRST Tech Challenge competitions.

PHI had so much fun helping mentor at this year's Summer Robotics Workshop, and we hope to do it again next year.

Mojave Scrimmage

This Saturday we are going to Mojave to participate in an informal scrimmage. The bot is getting ready, as are we. We will be there from 10 AM to 2 PM. The team will be there and will do matches. We hope to have a lot of fun driving and working on the bot.

This is not a drill!! Oh, wait, yes it is!

    We are starting new drills to help us hone in our driving skills. we are doing many new levels including really hard, micky carl, and make you cry. We hope this will kill time, make laughs, and help us drive better.

Scrimmage?

      Minataur (Jigatar, Jiggles) may still be used after all. There is a scrimmage in Mojave this April. The bot is to do demostrations or scrimmages. The team will also be touring the new space progams. We hope to see other teams there too!

No Worlds

We are probabbly not going to worlds this year however, we ae now fundrasing and helping 452 with their robot. We mainly work on their autonomies and do other minor things with the bot. We are now building nemisis bots to give Butters a challenge to get points, or for "awesomeness". Another thing we are doing is working on tutorial videos for Tetrix. The bot has not been used recently, now we are building a magnet ball rig to get more points if we have some other competition. Sadly, we never got to go to the engineering week scrimmage.