Activities

Schmahl Student Engineers	Schmahl Science Students in Action

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Pedal Power!! Making Pedal Cars from Bike Parts

It was an incredible day of cutting, sanding, welding and brainstorming at the Pedal Car Workshop. Kind of a Five Hour Junkyard Wars without the competition, the kids had the chance of a lifetime to take surplus bicycle parts and build the bike of their dreams, a kind of pedal car. With parents giving assistance, encouragement and occasionally answers, the kids worked like tornadoes and built four unique bicycle designs.

The Peterson team built a sidecar bike, one bike with a single wheel sidecar attached to the left side. Hey Mark: quite a stable design!

The Noel team built a four-wheel three person, tricycle? What a machine! And, first to trial, too. Built out of three bike frames with a center rod across the front and one steering wheel in the middle, three people could ride it at the same time. Quite a brainstorm!

Our all girl team, lead by our two high school ladies, produced a true tricycle, one front wheel, two rear wheels, with one driven wheel to settle those pesky turning issues. Oh, and the girls did their own welding!

Our last team began what looks like a very promising recumbent tricycle. They started with a frame from a 10-speed road bike, cut it liberally, turned everything around, backwards, upside down, and welded it back together again. An amazing creation with minimal parts! Just a bit more to finish and we'll have that rolling soon.

Bob Oliver, a genius with power tools and a man of infinite energy, truly blessed us all afternoon with his hard HARD work on the power steel cutters and wire welder. He patiently taught just about every student who wanted to weld and gave each one his or her chance at the welder. He was a dynamo, and we want to give him a VERY BIG THANK YOU!

And a big thank you to folks at Hertz Rentals on San Carlos who loaned us the welder free of charge! All the parents who attended also get a big thank you for your help with the kids work and for your patience.

Last, but not least, we'd like to thank one of our Workshop's Technical Advisory Board (TAB) members who attended, Rich Feldman. Rich, your technical insight, wealth of ideas and rich energy (pun intended) are amazing.

Survive on Science Summer Camp 2007

 

Robots as our friends: FIRST Lego Robotics

Steve Putz and Eva Carrender from the FIRST Lego Robotics WORM team hosted our first Lego Robotics workshop.

Kids learned how to operate the software tools, how to design different programs, how to download them to the robot, how to identify problems and debug the programs, how to enjoy a great robot! By building the robot from scratch, the kids learned the basic parts of a robot - body, wheels, eyes and brain. The body held the motors and axles that propelled the robot, the sensors that gave it eyes and the computer that gave it brains to control everything.

The first step was to have the robot move forward. The computer was programmed to simply turn on the wheel's motors. Some kids found their robots spun in circles! This was the first step in debugging the robot. Why was it spinning instead of going forward? Often the problem was a misconnected motor. With one motor connected backwards, the robot would have two wheels turning opposite each other and the robot just spun. It sounds simple, but this is the essence of debugging computer programs. Learning this skill is useful in so many parts of our lives, and is essential for our kids who will be working with computers in their future.

All in all the kids had a wonderful chance to build, fix and program a robot. The best of hardware and software in a simple project. What better way to spend an afternoon?