Everybody Loves Legos!

In 6th Period, we're starting our unit on robotics with Legos. Fun!

Wow...

The Engineering Projects course is going to be focused on developing a UAV next year. These UAVs being developed at University of Pennsylvania are mindblowing!:

Robots Ate My Job!

Click here to learn more at marketplace.org

Pneumatics!

Stan, Ruy and Armando have built the first operational piston system for our Machine Control Capstone Project. Nice job guys!

? - How could you employ this system in your robotic marble sorting solution?

Machine Control: Elevator!

STUXNET

"Make A Game In 8 Minutes"

A bit of a misnomer... We've taken a few periods in our Projects class to get through these! That said, it's still awefully quick to put something together.

I usually prefer to have students work at their own pace but I've had a lot of fun stepping us through as a group. It's been good interaction and fun to see everyone make breakthroughs on the effort at the same time:





A great question came up in class. "Is this really a game?"

What do you think? What makes a game a "game"?

We'll talk more about this issue, it's an important one!

Homestretch!

The Robotics Team has a midnight deadline on Tuesday to finish up their build. Good luck to all of you!

The team has been working hard these last weeks. Here are Andrew and Jackson showing me their basketball launching solution this afternoon:


Despite everyone's huge efforts, I caught the Engineering Gnome napping...


This guy is hard to catch in person. He must be wiped out from all the Engineering work!

Jackson, time to bring your Kinect in!

I recieved our copy of "Making Things See" yesterday. This book is about hacking the Xbox Kinect to work with your own hardware and software:


Wow, look who's brother is in the book?!

Branch Functions

We're getting into our RoboPro visual programming environment and Fishcertechnik robotics hardware in the Principles of Engineering courses.

What does this program do?

Smartest Machine on Earth

The video players only show one chapter of an episode at a time. For a better viewing experience use the hotlink beneath each player to open up the full episode on the PBS website. Otherwise you'll have to click through five or six times during the viewing to see the whole episode.

Watch Smartest Machine on Earth on PBS. See more from NOVA.

What is "machine learning"?

How did the IBM team employ that concept in the development of Watson's AI? What advantage did that provide over previous attempts at "intelligence"?

I've often mentioned the term "Empirical Scepticism". What does that mean? How does that relate to the concept of Machine Learning? How does this relate to your life?

Tiki Smasher!!!

Marco and Hunter have been putting together a little game in our Engineering Projects class.

"Tiki Smasher"! Coming soon to a smart phone near you...

Recursion

Iterative design is a cornerstone of the Creative Problem Solver experience. Here's a nifty video that displays the connection between iteration/recursion and the Madelbrot Fractal:




Recursion within this human constructed fractal is interesting to us because:

"Approximate fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar structure over an extended, but finite, scale range. Examples include clouds, river networks, fault lines, mountain ranges, craters,[8] snow flakes,[9] crystals,[10] lightning, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels, and ocean waves" - Excerpted from Wikipedia

The idea that recursive structures occur naturally adds weight to the idea of using an iterative process in design and problem solving.

"I'm Sorry Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That..."

This is a follow on for when we get back to programming next. We can continue from where we were with our "Hello World!" C++ program and modify it to replicate the best artificial intelligence that our space program can buy.

Challenge:
Craft a program that functions like the frustratingly perfect HAL 9000 from Stanly Kubric's seminal movie 2001.

Specifically:
(1pt) - Prompt the user to enter their name (see tips below)
(1pt) - Ask the user what they'd like to have HAL 9000 do and always reply with "I'm sorry (name entered), I'm afraid I can't do that"






A few thoughts that might help out:

Google C++ cin to understand how you can use the cin command to input text.

Before the main () function with the other #include place the following:
#include <string>

Inside the main () function you could use the following:
string user_input; //creates a string (text) variable named "user_input"
getline(cin, user_input); //the getline function can be used to enter a string (text) for the user_input variable

Python

Our work with the Fischertechnik robotics kits used Robo Pro, a very nice visual programing environment.

For our first efforts with actual text based programming, we will have a look at the language Python. You can click through here to visit Python.org.

Non essential trivia - Why was this language named Python? A clue is that the command line shell (not quite an actual IDE (Integrated Development Environment)) is named IDLE.

MIT Intro to Programming: Problem Set 0

Here's a link to our first programming problem set:
Intro to Programming: Problem Set 0

The problem set calls out a couple of links that may help you gain the knowledge you need to solve the problem. This link in particular may help you out:
Using variables and strings in Python.

Welcome to MIT: Intro to Computer Science

We've bypassed the whole 4 years of perfect grades/perfect SAT scores/plus some other incredible stuff and gone directly into participating in coursework from MIT... awesome!

Here's a link to the course that we'll be viewing a few lessons from. You'll need this from time to time when we discuss some of the basic programming assignments we'll get into:
MIT EECS 6.00: Intro to Computer Science and Programming

Is this Real?

We talked about the Turing Test in class today. A book called The Most Human Human was recently written on the topic (linked for anyone that's interested in learning more about the test and its history).

Computational Thinking

I've spent the weekend looking at the open courseware available from both Stanford and MIT in regards to introductory programming classes. There are compelling reasons to choose either one for our purposes.

Welcome to MIT:

A System of Systems

This video is not only entertaining but also very relevant to our class. What can we take away from this contraption?

What questions do we want to ask to support our understanding of this?

If you worked on this project, what subsystem would you build? Get your thinking caps on...