The Technic Alley

An interesting presentation – How FIRST Robotics can influence students and play a critical role in reshaping school education.

blip.tv video link

Over 140,000 children are participating in this year’s FIRST Lego League (FLL) tournament, comprising 14,725 teams from 56 countries. That’s almost a 14% growth over last year’s participation, as the chart on the FLL site shows.

Starting from the pilot tournament in 1998 in which 210 teams from 2 countries participated, FLL has grown steadily across the globe, and is now widely acknowledged as one of the best competitions to introduce kids to science and technology and motivate them.

First things first….

What is FIRST?

FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Here are some quotes and pictures from the FIRST website.

“FIRST is a  not-for-profit organization devoted to helping young people discover and develop a passion for science, engineering, technology, and math. Founded nearly 20 years ago by inventor Dean Kamen, the 2008-2009 FIRST season attracted over 196,000 students and over 85,000 mentors, coaches, and volunteers from 51 countries. The annual programs culminate in an international robotics competition and celebration where teams win recognition, gain self confidence, develop people and life skills, make new friends, and perhaps discover an unforeseen career path.”

 

FIRST competitions are….

“For students aged 6-18, it’s the hardest fun you’ll ever have. For team mentors, coaches, and volunteers, it’s the most rewarding adventure you’ll ever undertake. For sponsors, it’s the most enlightened investment you could ever make.”

There are several FIRST programs, for different age groups.

• Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL)
  • For 6 to 9 year olds
  • Introduction to science and technology
  • Real-world math & science concepts
  • Uses LEGO Education Simple and Motorized Mechanisms Set
  • Solutions require research, critical thinking, imagination
  • Students learn team-building, presentation skills
  
• FIRST Lego League (FLL)
  • For 9 to 14 year olds
  • Introduction to real-world scientific challenges
  • Design, build, and program LEGO-based robots
  • Complete tasks on a thematic playing surface
  • Research challenges facing today’s scientists  
  • Learn critical thinking, team-building, presentation skills  
  • May participate in Official Tournaments or local events
  
• FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)
  • For high-school students
  • Head-to-head competition using sports model 
  • Teams design, build, program robots on engineering principles 
  • Students learn, use sophisticated hardware & software  
  • Mentored by professional engineers  
  • Awards for competition, community outreach, design 
  • Qualify for >$7 million in scholarships
  
• FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC)
  • For high-school students
  • “Varsity sport for the mind” 
  • Strict rules, limited resources, time limits 
  • Students mentored by professional engineers  
  • Teams learn, use sophisticated hardware and software  
  • Build and compete with robots of their own design  
  • Qualify for >$10 million in scholarships
  
  

While driving on US 101 along the southern Oregon coast with family, we stopped by a very unique attraction – The Darligntonia Wayside,  a few miles north of Florence. This is a small park that you can find to your right immediately as you drive into the marked side-road off the highway. There is a sign-board with directions to the park. A short walk along a wooden structure leads you to an unusual concentration of the carnivorous plant called the California pitcher plant or the cobra-lily, with the biological name Darlingtonia Californica.

These strange serpent-shaped plants have an appendage below the curved hood where insects are attracted by the nectar, which  leads them inside the hood. Once inside the hood, the insects get trapped as they are confused by the many transparent “windows” that they mistake to be exits. The insects  fall into the lower part of the hood where downward pointing hairs prevent them from going back up, and eventually into the lower part of the stak at the bottom where they are digested by bacterial action. But what you can observe from outside is limited to the insects seeking nectar below the curved hood and entering the hood.

This is also a nice picnic stop if you are looking to take a little break while driving along the Oregon coast.

Darlingtonia Wayside Pictures

On my recent 1-week family road trip, I decided to try the Electromate-400. This handy travel companion can save you a lot of hassle in an emergency, but is quite useful even otherwise. Here are some of its neat features:

Power pack – My primary reason to buy the Electromate-400 was to use it as a power pack. I have been using the 12-Volt to 120V AC inverter to run the portable DVD player for kids on long drives. But one of the annoying problems with this is that whenever I stop the car for taking a little break on the wayside or to fill gas, etc, the power from the inverter gets turned off and so does the DVD player. So I have been looking for an inverter with a power-pack for a while, and this one seemed like a good choice, with its built-in rechargeable battery. But the Electomate-400 does more than that –  it provides two 120V AC outlets, along with two 12V DC outlets. So many of the gadgets that you would run off the “cigarette lighter outlet” in the car can go on this directly.  So you really have two choices: plug in  120V AC appliances to the inverter output, or 12V DC appliance to the DC output. The nice thing about the DC output is that is comes off directly from the internal battery, and so does not require the inverter to be running. The power pack can be charged from the car’s 12V outlet while it is being used, or from a 120V AC household outlet when at home (or your hotel). Having this in the car made it very convenient for passengers to use the portable DVD player without being interrupted by minor stops for filling gas, etc.

The power pack can be quite useful at home too. There was a general power outage recently in the neighborhood where I live which lasted a few hours.  I used the Electromate to power a flourescent lamp that lit up our family room adequately until the power got restored.

 Jump starter – If your car battery got drained for some reason and you needed a jump start, this feature may be able to get you back on the road without having to wait for AAA or someone else to give you a jump start. This also includes an alternator voltage check and polarity check feature. I got a chance to try this feature not during the trip, but a couple of months later. Just as we got ready to go out for a family lunch, I found that my Honda Pilot wouldn’t start due to a low battery. I opened the hood and hooked up the Electromate to the battery as the instructions said, and turned the ignition key. And Voila! The SUV started on the first attempt!

Air compressor – Have low air pressure on your tires? You can use the air compressor with the built-in pressure gauge to set your tires to correct pressure if you are far from a gas station. This can be handy to check your tires every morning before starting your drive for the day. This can also be used to pump up sports equipment such as basketballs, inflatable tents, floatation devices and so on.

Built-in LED light – Although not very big, the built-in light can be useful if you need an emergency light or work light. For example, if you are trying to pump air into the tires in the dark, the light can be very useful.

Handy portable unit – Built like a boombox, the Electomate-400 is easy to carry with you, so you can move it from your car to our home or hotel room without a sweat. If you are camping or having fun in a park or a beach, this can serve as a very useful power source to run your lights, music players, small TVs or notebook computers.

Priced at around $99, the Electomate-400 is a useful gizmo to have in your car when you go on long road trips. It is very compact, portable and quite easy to use. It is a very handy power-pack that can make your trip more fun, and can give your car a jump start or pump air to your tires in an emergency.

Here is an interesting creation using Mindstorms NXT, a Rolling-Orbital-Bluetooth-Operating-Thing (ROBOT) as its creator calls it.

Spherical Robot 02 (YouTube)

This project uses two NXT controllers: one inside the “thing” and an external one that acts as the remote control. The two controllers communicate via Bluetooth. The external controller is also uses NXT motors that are very cleverly used as joystick controllers (the NXT motors can also be used like generators).

This is a great example of how multiple NXT controllers can be put to work in tandem.

Here is an interesting “nudge” that I noticed near my local school recently. On one of the bigger streets adjacent to the school, the “School 25 MPH” sign tends to get ignored by many drivers; probably some larger signs would help. There is one particular intersection that gets really busy just before school time in the mornings. So there are volunteers policing traffic every morning, trying to ensure that the kids and the adults walking them to school cross the streets safely.

Recently, I noticed that someone has come up with a very effective idea to slow down the speeding drivers on the busy street. Every morning, there are three orange rubber cones placed across the street, along the crosswalk. Two of these are at the edge of the street, touching the curb. The third is exactly in the middle of the crosswalk, at the road-divider line. So, none of these cones directly impede traffic in any way — they don’t block any of the lanes. Yet, just being placed visibly along the crosswalk seems to remind all the drivers about the school zone and nudges them to slow down and look for people trying to cross the street.

Have you thought of a feature or an application that you wished your PC or Notebook  supported? What if you could design it yourself?

WePC.com is a social network that was recently launched by Intel and Asus, aimed at giving users an opportunity to share their ideas and insights on future designs as well as vote on some product ideas.

The intro page says:

“Imagine your perfect PC. Now imagine top engineers and innovators working around the clock to make that Dream PC a reality. That’s the dream WePC.com is all about.”

Sounds interesting? You can sign up for an account and join many others in the pursuit of creating your perfect PC.  You can share ideas about your dream PC, or create a description of it. You can view dozens of selected ideas and vote on them. Then there is a community-blog where you can talk about your ideas, your dreams products and gripes about existing ones,  and comment on others’ posts.

Does it really work? Apparently, it does; there are thousands of ideas for you to look at and vote on. And the number seems to be growing.

Why does it work? Presumably, there are tons of people who have good ideas that they would like to see implemented and developed into products, but don’t have the resources to do it on their own. So here they are, driving innovation by sharing their ideas with companies that are eager to listen, and find some hot ideas and features to stay ahead in their game.

This is another perfect example of what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “maven-trap” in his book The Tipping Point: a free forum that gives you the tools to create and share your product ideas, vote on others’ ideas and discuss them with other like-minded people. To a lot of people, that’s highly motivating.

This is likely to become a trend not just in the computer industry, but any other consumer-oriented industry as well: automotive, appliances, entertainment, toys and other kids’ products, etc. Would that be a win-win situation for the consumers and the producers? At the outset, it promises to be.

Would there be any challenges? How does it affect patenting? Won’t all competing companies have access to ideas being discussed in each other’s forums? What does it mean to them? Does this create a level playing field for ideas and innovation that’s accessible to everyone, and thus force companies to compete only on the basis “time-to-market,” i.e.,  how quickly they can translate these ideas into real products?

Those are questions for the lawyers to scratch their heads about, but I suspect that the mavens frequenting these forums wouldn’t want to waste their time on such boring issues.

“How many miles can I drive on a gallon of gasoline?”

“How many gallons of gasoline do I need to travel 10,000 miles?”

Is there anything fundamentally different in these two questions?

Consider the following examples:

Let’s say you drive 10,000 miles in a year on an average. If you have a car that gives you 10 miles-per-gallon (MPG), then you would need
1,000 gallons of gas every year. If the price-per-gallon is $3, then you would spend $3,000 in a year on gas.

Now, if you changed to a car that gives you 20 MPG, then you would get twice as many miles per gallon, costing you 500 gallons, and so you would spend $1,500 per year on gas.  And if you bought a car that gives you 40 MPG, then you would spend $750 per year.

As you can see, changing from a car that gives 10 MPG to 20 MPG saves  you about $1500 of gas in a year, but going from 20 MPG to 40 MPG only saves you about $750.

So, if you think in terms of MPG, a car that gives 20 MPG is twice as good as the one that gives you 10 MPG, one that gives 40 is twice as good as the one that gives you 20. But when you look at it from the perspective of cost per mile, or GPM, you save significantly more when you change from 10 MPG to 20 MPG, than when you change from 20 MPG to 40 MPG.

Watch this video from The MPG Illusion guys.

Do you have a Picasa Web Album and would like to share it on your Facebook profile? You can use the Picasa Gallery Slideshow application on Facebook. Here is how to set it up:

1. Install the Picasa Gallery Slideshow application on Facebook.
2. Log in to Picasa and open the album that you want to create the slideshow for.
3. Click on “Link to this album.”
   • You will see some HTML code in a box below the words “Paste HTML to embed in website.” Copy this to your Facebook Picasa Gallery.
   • You will also see a link that says “Embed Slideshow.” Clicking on that pops up a window. You will find some Javascript code. Copy this code and paste it into your Facebook Picasa Gallery.
4. Visit your Facebook profile. You should see an embedded graphic link to your Picasa Album, probably inside your “Boxes” menu. You can move it to your wall if you wish.