I, Robot

Faith is taking a beginning robotics class as part of her home school this year.  She is working with the Lego WeDo.  It is a kit of Legos with several books worth of models she can build  and software for programming a motor and a couple of sensors.  Amazingly, she can actually do it by herself and she is loving it.  She has a lot of determination and patience.

This picture isn't so great, but Faith and her friend, Anders were working together to program an alligator they built.  They were making it open and close it's mouth and say "yummy" as it ate a Lego guy inside its mouth.  They were SO cute it was painful.

But Faith is not the only girl around here expanding her robotic horizons! Elinor is taking an Introduction to Robotics class that works with the Lego Mindstorm NXT.  These are the same robots Clark's PiPod team programmed.  This is pretty challenging for her but she is enjoying it.  She and I stayed up late on Friday night building "Alpha Rex" the humanoid robot.  It was a long process but we had to get it finished and operating by Saturday at noon.

The girls were invited to join Clark and his Pi Pod team representing Utah's First Lego League downtown for Salt Lake City's first Maker Faire.  The boys were going to show off their Battle-Bots and the girls were showing off their creations.

Another super junkie picture, but it kind of shows their creations.  They are not doing a FLL team this year, but they still enjoy playing around with the robots.  Clark and another teammate are mentoring Elinor's class.  

Here's my favorite moment of the day.   Faith was sitting at her computer showing how she'd programmed the alligator.  Faith can be painfully shy at times, especially when it comes to talking to people she doesn't know well.  They were asking her questions and I could tell she was so scared, but she stayed there and tried to talk to them and explain what she was doing.  Hooray for doing hard things!!