Boat construction continued again today. With the school year winding down, students are either helping with the boats or beginning the monumental task of cleaning and organizing the shop. We have several students dedicated just to sorting bolts and nuts – for some reason they seem to enjoy it. We call it a Zen task. A few more photos of the boats today.
I’ve been making several versions of my bluetooth radio with lasercut frame. Each edition gets a little more streamlined, and I improve the finishing process and wire management. The one pictured below is for my brother Eden. It still needs its internals, which is something I can work on this week. I think the exterior came out well, and it is going to look very nice in his workshop. The paint is a Krylon satin red spraypaint, and the interior face is also a satin blue on the inside of a clear acrylic plate.
The first cardboard boat was completely assembled this afternoon. Now the students need to spend time painting the skin with polyurethane sealant to keep out the water. After it is sealed, they will then paint the boat with some sort of color scheme, and from our discussions it appears they want to try and make it look like a leaf. Should be interesting. The cardboard boat races are just over a week away, so I think they are in a decent place to get it completed and ready for the water. A few photos below.
This week I have the freshmen. My co teacher and I switch each week who is teaching them. Since our classroom has lockers, we decided to have them make their own locker badges. We created a template file for Inkscape, and then I created a video to show them how to complete the file and send it to the laser cutter. The video includes how to vectorize a photo of themselves to place on the locker badge as well as adding text for their name. It’s a relatively quick little project, but gives them a sense of ownership within the shop. I’ll take some more photos of all the completed badges in the next few days. For now, here is a link to the project page.
Today the Sumobots finally did some battle against each other. There were several entries from our student teams, which included names such as Bozo Bot, Mama Tipson, Connoli, Open-Faced Sandwich, Reverse Sandwich, and Kendo(Revived). Many of the bots were not as fully developed as the students wanted, but they are learning the difficulties of creating a fully autonomous robot from scratch. My favorite bot had to be Kendo(Revived) which is far and away the most advanced bot of the group. It features a plasma and waterjet steel scraper and jaw to remove combatants from its path, and is build on a solid foundation with triple traction wheels and custom circuit board. Additionally, the students were adding small magnets to get the bot to the heaviest allowable weight for combat. We had a lot of fun watching the robots today, and will probably have another day of bouts in the next few weeks, which will allow students to update their robots and make them better.
