Download our Stickers!

Have you seen our skit presentation for the 2015-2016 Trash Trek season? In there we explain our three-part solution.

One part is our downloadable stickers. They are available now! You can print them and use them in your household or classroom.

Just attach them to items you want young children to recognize as recyclable and show them where to recycle the items.

Also, to encourage them to use the recycling bin, and to remind them about recycling, you can print a larger image of Benny the Recycle Bin and attach it to your recycle bin in your house, outside, in your classroom, and everywhere you toss recyclables.

If the link above didn't work try this: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_PAr03IvATaaWhFSmJLQjRSNEU&usp=sharing

Recycle Rap
by Benny the Recycle Bin

On bottled water and other kids things,
Look no further than the packaging.
See my photo, and then you'll know,
Where to put that recyclable.

Recycle, yes or no? The label lets you know!

Can You Help Us?

We are struggling with precision and repeatability with our robot! Can you help us?

We use the EV3 gyro sensor to drive straight and turn precisely. But the gyro values seem to change over time. This is a big problem for us.

For example, when we drive the robot in a straight line across the field, it starts ending as much as 10 beams to the left (N on a field). Slowly, it moves right to be at what should be 0*. Then, it begins to migrate further to the right (S on a field).

Turns behave the same way. A 90* turn goes too far, then over time, it's correct, then not far enough.

So, over the coarse of a programming session of 30-60 minutes or more, we have to keep changing our gyro values.

This is an issue at a tournament. It's impossible to know exactly which values to use.

Please leave us a comment if you have suggestions.

Thank you!

Code For Our Test

Dinner With The T.E.A.M.

You know the team spends a lot of time at your house when Hauken gets out the frying pan, wooden spoon, and oil to cook his own pork fried rice for dinner.
Last time Kenneth brought a crockpot with his dinner!

Our Mentors Disappeared!?

Today's meeting kicked off with a sign on the door saying, "What would you do if your coaches and mentors disappeared for one meeting? Hmm...". A judge had asked us that question at our sectional tournament. So our coaches were inspired to find out!

So we ran our meeting all by ourselves for two hours. We did really well too! We started out by setting goals for the meeting. Then we practiced our skit a couple times. Next we created and completed our own teamwork exercises. After that we broke into two sub-teams. One worked on building attachments and rethinking some programming and strategy. For inspiration, the other group did research on how other teams accomplish certain robot tasks. Finally we met back together to see what we could do with everything we had learned.

When our coaches joined us for the end of the meeting, we discussed what we learned. It was really cool to see what we were capable of on our own. It really gave us a good sense of teamwork and leadership and better feel for what the role of the coach means to us. Actually, it was so fun, we talked of possibly trying it again sometime!

After dinner, some of the team stayed extra and worked further on attatchment designs and strategy for our robot. We also began testing our gyro sensors to see how consistent and accurate we can get them and which one of the two we own works best.

It was a neat meeting that was productive and gave us new experiences in a fun way!

Waukesha JanBoree

Each year at the Waukesha JanBoree, we bring our robot and our project display boards to share with our community. We have many families who come back year after year to see our team, our robot, and see what new thing we invented!

This year we displayed at the library for about two hours and introduced hundreds of people to FIRST! We had so many interested people, it was hard to keep up! Some families were so excited about what we showed them that they came back to our table two, even three times!

Overall it was a fun and successful day.

Our Skit

We presented our innovative solution to project judges at the Saturday 12/12/15 Wisconsin Sectional Competition in Mukwanogo.

The setting for our skit takes place on Sesame Street with Oscar the Grouch as the central character. We present our idea to introduce a new character to the Sesame Street cast, Recycle Bin Benny, who would teach children on a daily basis about recycling.

Before our Regional tournament, we conducted research which showed that adding Benny's image to the common 3-arrow recycle logo would help children recognize what items may be recycled, and in which bin to put the items.

The outstanding results from our study helped us to win the Research Award at the Sectional competition!
You can still help us with our survey research before we compete at State too! Check out our survey post for more details.

You may notice our team's unique presentation style. The judges have a rubric to fill out and we like to help them by formatting our skit around the rubric! We go right down the line, starting with the problem identification, through innovative solution and effectiveness.

With this efficient layout, the judges are able to circle every section of their sheet by the time our five minute skit is finished. This presentation style has worked amazingly well for several years and the judges like it too!

Enjoy our video!

Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

3 Missions, 696 Points

Finally we have videos uploaded of all three of our main missions! We have a couple more backup missions for if something goes wrong with our main three.

We are working on many updates and improvements to our missions, but these videos should give you a good idea of how we are doing so far.  :)

If all goes as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.

MISSION 1 - 113 Points

MISSION 2 - 287 Points

MISSION 3 - 260 Points