Coach’s Blog June 25
Communications: If five days, the BUA Intranet, FIRST Class will go offline, so make sure you have migrated to your BU G-mail account. We now have new google groups for the students and mentors. One for parents coming soon. There is a GoogleCalendar with all robotics events now, and you should have received an invitation to view it.
EPIC Cleanup: On Friday, June 26th at 12 noon we need anyone available to finish cleaning out EPIC. All the valuable stuff should be moved to the lab. The wooden field pieces can be left in EPIC to be thrown out. Good pieces of carpet can go to BUA. Either the gym or the hallway outside of Stone’s office can work.
VEX Robots Nothing But Net: This Sunday we will start building VEX robots. 2-6 PM. You can view the game on Robot Events. We will also have the lab open on Wednesday evenings (from 5 to 9 PM) and Sunday afternoons (from 2 to 6 PM) to work on VEX robots. This is an effort to teach our younger students a lot about the robotics design process. We will be designing robotics based on the new VEX Robotics Competition game, Nothing But Net.
Tour of the GE Aviation: We are rescheduling the GE Aviation tour! Please, fill out this doodle so that we know what date works best for everyone. Again, only US citizen (including green card holders) are able to attend. At this plant, we design/assemble/test F404 engine, F414 engine, T700 engine (Apache and Blackhawk), new presidential helicopter, and many more!
In The News:
The NASA Invention of the Year goes to Robotnaut as reported by NASA. Robonaut is currently on the International Space Station.
R2 and I go back a long way.
I like this article from the NY Times on developing a planetary defense system to protect us from the BIG ONE, the asteroid to wipe out life on Earth.
So get ready for Asteroid Day on June 30th. That is the drive to accelerate the tracking of those killer asteroids. The guy in charge is Lord Martin Rees, who spoke at BUA a few years ago. The other big names are Bill Nye (yeah the Science Guy). Oh and Brian May who is a big-name astrophysicist. He also started some small band called Queen. Here you have Lord Rees and Brian May. Have you ever considered when he wrote “We will rock you” maybe he was thinking about a giant rock hitting the Earth?
There are new cool images of the asteroid Ceres which has some mysterious white spots. See the Washington Post article. Cool pictures from the Dawn spacecraft.
Meanwhile, the New Horizon satellite is taking pictures of Pluto, the object formally called a planet. See NBC news.
