July 30 Coaches Blog

This coming week:

CAD: Sam will be running another CAD workshop Monday evening at 7PM at the CAD lab. Please sign up both so we know who’s been showing up and so we know there will be a class.  http://doodle.com/udxhwddzpap445w9

VEX: The underclassmen continue to do some great protoyping with the Nothing but Net game.  I like this shooter! We continue to meet Sundays at 2 and Wednesdays at 5!

vex gears

Artemis Demo: Many thanks to Jordan, Michael, and Paul for showing Scorpion to the girls in the Artemis camp which is a computer science camp for girls from around Boston.  Each year we lend Artemis some of our LEGO Robotics kits.

Artemis DemoLowRes

We have several demos for Scorpion coming up within the third week of August.  We need a lot of help with the Boston Scientific Demo!

Boston Scientific Demo Logistics: We need several more students to respond to the Calendar for the demo.  I will resend an invite about this.  We also need someone to volunteer to drive the robot.   Parent help will be appreciated in this event.

The event is Tuesday, August 18th. Boston Scientific address is 100 Boston Scientific Way in Marlborough. The majority of activities will be in bldg. 100.  Boston Scientific has a tent and power for us.  They will provide snacks and lunch so no need bring anything with you unless you want to. They will provide a lab tour of our R&D facilities!

We should arrive at around 8:15AM if at all possible or earlier. The true activities begin at 9:15 so you would have an hour to get settled, debug, etc. We plan on ending at 2:30PM.

Boston Green Fest: Friday August 21st or Saturday August 22nd Scorpion demo: We have done this several times.  This might also be a good opportunity to clear out our remaining inventory of FIRST LED Light Bulbs.

Boston Children’s Museum TinkerTent on Sunday August 23rd.  It promises to be a whole lot of fun, with thousands of families filtering through and seeing our great work.  This year we will be joined by the MIT Media Lab, Einstein’s Workshop, The Design Museum, The Revolving Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, The Eliot School and more organizations.

Battlebots: I was excited to watch the final episode of Battlebots!  Bite Force winning was quite the upset over Tombstone!

In the News:

Amazon Envisions Drone Airspace (San Jose Mercury News): Interesting article on how Google, Amazon, and NASA are working together to prevent a mass swarming of drones in the air and make it an organized collective of drones flying in harmony. The effort is not in making the drones, but in a method of Aircraft (or drone) Control to keep things organized.

Coding Schools attract career changers: (NY Times):  In the NY Times article it talks about people who are going back to school to learn to code and then quadrupling their salaries.  So maybe we should be requiring computer science in high schools.  Of course, you can’t learn comp sci in a bubble.  Knowing a field to go along with it makes you more attractive to employers.

White House Summit: (Inside Higher Ed): On this note Obama is holding a meeting today to explore the options of these coding schools.

Hope for the liberal arts? (Forbes): On the other hand this article in Forbes makes the case for the liberal arts degree.  All these tech companies need people to work in sales and marketing.  More importantly, they need people in what is called Human Factors.  How do you make your ingenious product actually usable.

Star Wars weapons: (Reuters): Cool article about how the US Military is developing laser and microwave weapons.  Things have come a long way since Reagan envisioned his Star Wars project.