Ridge View Academy Is A Denver Public Charter School Under Contract With The Colorado Department Of Youth Corrections
Home of The RAMS –
Respect Attitude Motivation & Spirit;
RVA Is A 500 Bed Facility
• RVA Began An Association With FIRST Robotics in 2004
• FIRST – For Inspiration & Recognition Of Science And Technology – Brings Together High School Students For An Intense Competition That Includes A 6– Week Build Period Where Teams Design, Engineer, & Manufacture Their Robot
• Each Year The Competition Is Designed Around A Specific Type Of Challenge
• In 2004, Teams Had To Build A Bot That Could Stack Or Move Small Tetrahedrons Onto Larger Field Tetras
• In The 2005 Competition Named Aim High, Teams Had To Shoot Or Dump 7‖ Nerf Balls Into A Backboard 13 Ft. Tall Or Into A Low Goal
• Beginning In November—December Teams Need To Start Thinking About The January Kick-Off Date When They Receive Their ―Kit-O-Parts‖ And Find Out The Task For That Year
• Considering I Teach Applied Technology, Integrating A Technology Lesson Plan Into The Curriculum Is Almost Humorous –
• One Of The Challenges Each Year For The Rambotix Team Has Been To Get Some Of The Students Involved With Using Auto-CAD, Which Is Available To The Teams For Free
• Unfortunately, We Have Never Been Able To Offer This As A Formal Course And In The Past Two Years We Really Have Not Been Able To Take Advantage of This Technology
. . .soooooo
WOULDN’T IT BE NICE IF –
We Could Take Our Team Design Meetings And Add To The Design Process From This
Into Something More Like This
• Or Perhaps A Little More Realistically Like This
Coupled w/ This
• Because These Guys Want To DO Better and add to the legacy from The Last Two Year’s Robots
• When I Saw The Lego Digital Designer Earlier This Year I Thought, Hey Wait A Minute . . .This Might Actually Be Fun
• So Off To Creating The Lesson Plan And Checking To Make Sure This Would Work
• I First Loaded The Software Onto My Computer In Order To Familiarize Myself With The Software
• Next, I Checked System Requirements To Make Sure It Would Run On My Student Machines
• Minimum System Requirements for PC
• Operating system:
• Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP.
• CPU: 450 MHz Pentium III or faster processor
• Graphics card:
• 16 MB graphics card
• (DirectX 8.0 or higher compatible)
• RAM: 128 MB
• Hard Disk Space: 100 MB
• Then I Loaded The Software On The Classroom Computers
• And I Reloaded It
• Again
• And Again • Uhh Ohh
• So After A Few Days Of Pulling Out My Hair. . . Uhhhh,
• I Changed The Bios Settings And Reallocated 32 Mb VRAM
• Surely This Will Now Work. . And It Did Sorta
• It Took The Software Nearly 15 Minutes To Load
• Well I Figured Out That Even Though My 5 Year-Old Celeron Processors With 128 MB of Ram Met The Requirements, The 8 Mb VRAM Did Not.
• Once Loaded It Actually Functioned –
Like Sap Draining From A Vermont Maple Tree In Winter
& It Seemed To Have A Funny Effect On
Some of My Students
• I Created A Eval Sheet for The Students To Use & Turned Them Loose With The Following Instructions:
• Open The Software & Go To Work. Let Me Know What You Think
• 3 Students Were Able To Spend One Lesson Using The Software And Concluded That:• Moving Pieces In And Out Of The Design Plane
Was Easy
• Overall The Software Was Not Too Difficult To Master
• It Was Cool To Build Legos Instead Of Editing Word Documents And Spreadsheets
• The Students All Asked The Same Question:• When Do We Get To Use The CAD Software to Build
Next Year’s Robot
• I Responded With:• When I Get New Computers!!
Merry Christmas