Four more weeks!

For last week Neshaya did a ton of work to calculate the cost of wasted shower water in cities across North America.  It involved finding the cost of water (including sewer and stormwater charges), along with the groundwater temperature, and the cost of energy in the form of natural gas or electricity needed to heat the water from the groundwater temperature to the hot water tank temperature.

Of all the cities she looked at, Atlanta was the most expensive with an average cost of $680 Canadian dollars per year.  And out of 30 cities, there were only four where our innovation wouldn't pay for itself in less than a year.  I put the data on the map below. 

Annual cost of wasted shower water by city

Nice work Neshaya!

As for the robot, Olivia, and Ella worked on the Water Collection mission and got that working.  If we can fit it in to our 2.5 minutes we'll be able to get almost 400 points if everything works.  Getting everything to work is still a challenge and it's going to require a lot of debugging and practicing between now and January.

Dropping the stacked water in the target area

We put together a list of additional goals for this month and they include:

1) Get more presentation feedback from experts.
2) Show our project to more people who could benefit.
3) Add more project features, including making it look more professional.
4) Print out our sample code and design processes.

We'll work on more of those goals tomorrow!

Project progress

It's been a busy week between meetings.  Olivia and Lily worked on our machine learning model and made some great progress.  If you remember, at the time of the regionals, we could predict showers with 90% accuracy.  Olivia and Lily improved that to 76% over the weekend.  Why is 76% an improvement over 90%, you ask?  Because although the new model heats water more times than necessary, it heats it almost every time it's supposed to.  So, as you can see in the chart below, out of 100 times someone comes into the bathroom, the system only fails to heat the water once.  It heats it 18 times when it doesn't need to, but existing systems heat it 100 times when they don't need to.

In addition, the new system runs on Amazon's computers.  That means that a computer with next to no intelligence can tell it that someone just came into the bathroom, and it will reply telling it whether to heat the water.  Cool!

In addition, Nic was hard at work designing circuit boards.  Here's a picture of a board we sent off to get manufactured for $1 each:

It would fit on top of an Arduino and replace the rats nest of wires we currently see.  The company we sent it to to get made said there are a couple of wires that cross each other that need to go around each other instead, and we need to change that.  That's not a big deal and we can probably fix it this week.  Good work Nic!

Olivia emailed one of the judges from the regionals who said she'd be happy to give us more feedback on our project presentation as we get ready for the Provincials.  That was very nice of her and could be a big help.

I also met with Gary Bennett, one of the property managers we were hoping to talk to before the regionals.  Some of you may remember him from Nature's Fury.  He was the mayor of Kingston during the Ice Storm and gave us some great ideas that year.  He said he'd be happy to help us again and hear more about our water saving innovation.

Congratulations!

Congratulations Comet Warriors!  You did very well at the Kingston Regional FLL Tournament on Nov. 18th.  It was an extremely close competition and a cliff hanger up to the end.  There were a number of other excellent teams there but after a lot of work and a bit of luck you're off to the Provincials in Oshawa on Jan 13th.

Here are a few highlights from the Regionals:

Our Best Run of the Day (the Comet Warriors)

Coaches and Mentors (the Comic Worriers)

And don't forget the news coverage, featuring Nic, at:

 Kingston Students Compete in Lego Robotics Competition

A few random shots of people having fun between matches:

Congratulation again to everyone!

Less than a Month

This past week has been very busy and productive!  Nice work, everyone.  In addition to last Wednesday's meeting we had another garage sale on Saturday along with more building and project work, and another team meeting on Monday.

Where this puts us with just under a month to go is:

Robot: Can accomplish all missions for Zones 1, 2, and 3, for a total of 190 points.  If everything goes smoothly we can get those 90 points with slightly less than a minute to spare, so we can likely add more missions over the next few weeks.  We need, though, to focus on reliability.  That means doing more of what we did yesterday: running missions over and over to find out where things go wrong and improving them, and getting used to setting up and running the robot repeatably.

Project: We've had Hannah's prototype for a few weeks now, and she's gotten some good practice presenting it.  In addition, Nic's made good progress on an Arduino-based version of Hannah's prototype, which if it can work would cost a lot less, use less energy, and be less obvious in a bathroom.

We still need to work on our team presentation, and have been talking about a Phineas and Ferb skit where our project foils the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz and his plan to take over the tri-state area.  Think hard about how we can fit all the information we need to present into that type of skit.

Core Values: With a lot of help from Ella team spirit and teamwork have been really improving.  In fact, I believe there was a coach-free meeting at school to discuss how to organize a book sale. Check Slack to see Ella's suggestions for how to answer judges' questions.  We'll be working on this tomorrow.

5 Weeks to Go

With five weeks to go before the regionals, we've got our work cut out for us.  Good work on Ella's core values exercise!  If we can complete each other's sentences we're a close-knit team for sure!

Helen took us through an important communication exercise and discussion of project tasks.  Below is the prioritized list of project features we came up with, based on how much people complained about existing problems and how hard we thought they'd be to solved.

At the top of the list are a) Too slow, b) Uses too much gas/electricity, c) Timer is too difficult to adjust, and d) Too noisy)

Prioritized list of product features.

These four items are things we said were important and easy to do.  So, how do we do them?  (Or any of the others on the list for that matter?)  Please get on Slack and post your suggestions!

Bill Allen discussing hot water problems with the team.

It was great to meet Bill Allen (that name is one of several possible facts you'll need to know for the homework exercise).  He is an actual plumbing expert, given his years of experience both as a plumber himself and as an owner of a plumbing company.  It was good to get his suggestions on approaches to our problem.  One of his suggestions was to connect the pump to the shower light switch, so that when somebody turns on the shower light the water gets heated automatically.  It would be good to know how many showers have a light just for the shower.  For homework please check the showers in your house and see whether there's a light just for the shower, or whether the light is for the whole bathroom.  It probably wouldn't be ideal to heat the water every time someone turned on the bathroom light.

Lastly, with some mentoring from Ella, we made some good progress on the robot.  Hannah, Tara, Macy, and Alyssa sped up the Flow mission and made it more reliable, and also completed the Faucet mission.  That gets us to a reliable 120 points, up from last week's 95.  Good job!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Comet Warriors!  Good work last week, and congratulations to Nick on the Homework Award.

Among other things, we got 3 out of 4 Zone 1 missions working, some of which are shown in the video below:

In addition, with the cancellation of the weekend Garage Sale due to bad weather, we got the Pump Addition mission finished as well.  That finishes off Zone 1.  Those missions together give us 95 points with another five and a half weeks before the tournament.  Not bad, but still plenty of work left to do.

Thank you Ella for another interesting, fun, and valuable Core Values exercise.  Building a Lego model of our research problem was a great teamwork exercise and the team did much better than we did at the start of the season.

Olivia posted a document on Slack listing the problems people have with existing Hot Water Recirculation products.  Please read it!  We've got a solution to one of these problems, we hope, but there are still plenty more.  For this week please think hard about how these remaining problems could be fixed.  Could we make the timer easier to adjust?  How?  Could we make the water heat up quicker?  How?  And so on.

If we can decide whether these problems are easy, medium, or difficult to solve we could combine that information with how much people complain about them and come up with a prioritized list of which problems to work on.

Also, on the topic of the project, Macy's Uncle Bill (name of the week) may be able to visit with us on Wednesday to give his thoughts on what we're trying to do.  So come prepared to discuss our project so far, and whatever additional ideas you come up with between now and then.

Lastly, the First Lego League organizers would like to know who would like badges this season showing how many years they've been involved with FLL.  The badges are a few dollars each, so if you'd like one let us know.

A Busy Week

Congratulations, Warriors, on a very busy and productive week!  Our yard sale was a big success, raising $190.  Kudos to Neshaya for organizing that, and thanks to everyone for helping out, manning tables, recruiting customers, and rounding up donations.

Alyssa and Macy Selling Like Crazy

For our project we did a lot of work to understand how much energy is required to heat water, how much water needs to be heated to start a shower, and how much energy is required to keep heating it while the shower is running.  We also learned how quickly the heat is lost once the shower stops, whether its through plastic or copper pipes, 1/2" or 3/4" diameter, and insulated or not.

Lais Heating Water

Nick Logging Data

Cooling Rates for PEX Pipes

With all of this information we should be able to figure out how much it costs to operate different solutions to our problem of wasted water.

We also worked on prototypes of our innovative solution.  Existing solutions either heat the water whenever it goes cold, or else whenever it gets cold within certain hours.  Using Lego controllers, motors, and sensors, Hannah built a hot water re-circulation system that only turns on if a) someone enters the bathroom, and b) the water is cold.  It then recirculates the hot water until the water in the pipe is hot, and then stops.  It does this by sending Bluetooth (wurd of the week)  messages from an EV3 that would go under the sink, to a second EV3 at the water tank which would turn the water on and off.  Congratulations, Hannah!  If we make no further progress we've at least got a working prototype of our system.

Lily and Olivia worked on the missions for Zone 1 over the weekend and can fairly reliably do the Water Filtration and Pump Addition missions, with good progress on the Rain mission as well.

This week we hope to make more progress on the robot missions, and to look for ways to improve or reduce the cost of our prototype solution.

Thank you, Ella!

First, a big Thank You to our mentor, Ella Hsu!  That was a really fun and tricky team challenge she gave us: cutting a hole in a sheet of paper so that a team member could fit through it.  We learned - or re-learned - a few things that can help us with any type of team challenge: include everybody, get several ideas before starting, build on each others' ideas, encourage each other, and remember it's the teamwork that counts more than the solution!

Second, we've only got 7 weeks left before the regional tournament!  That's not a lot of time and we've got a ton of work to do.  What this means is that we'll be relying on Slack a lot.  In fact, we'd like to get as much done between meeting as we do at the meetings themselves.  If you don't remember how to log on, go to:

https://cometwarriors.slack.com/

and enter your username and password.  If you don't remember your login information, email Helen and she'll get it sorted out.

We picked our research topic, which will be finding or improving methods to avoid wasting water when waiting for your shower to heat up.  In our house it takes almost a minute for the show to get hot enough to step into, and running the show for a minute wastes 11 liters of water.  We do that three times a day, which adds up to over 4000 liters of water per year.  That's 10% of all the water we use.  Other than taking cold showers, how can we reduce this waste?  Tara did some research during the meeting and the results are being discussed on Slack.  So log in and start contributing your thoughts.

To investigate this problem further we're going to need to build a simulated plumbing system and run some experiments on it to learn about heating water, piping it, cooling it, dumping it, etc.  Come this week with your ideas on how to do this.

Also, last weekend four team members including Olivia, Tara, Macy, and Lily went to the Lucknow Fall Fair in Western Ontario.  It was a great opportunity to cheer each other on while learning about farm life.  Here are Lily and Olivia trying their hand in the hay bale tossing competition and picking up $8 for their efforts!  It didn't quite pay for the trip but gave us an idea of what it might be like to work loading hay wagons or feeding cattle.  Hard work!  Remember, what we learn is more important than what we win.

The word of the week, by the way, is our mentor's last name.  Also, something I'd like you to do for Wednesday is measure the time it takes for your shower to heat up.  How many seconds pass from the time you turn on the hot water tap until the water is warm enough for you to get into the shower?

This past weekend I went to the FLL Kickoff at Bayview Glen School in Toronto.  They're a really impressive team, and won the Champion's Award in St. Louis last season.  They do a huge amount of work promoting FLL in Ontario and deserve all the credit they get.

I'll be filling you in on some of what I learned at the Kickoff, and it would probably be helpful to other local teams for us to share the information with them as well.

P.S This is Olivia editing this post on Monday, the twenty-fifth of September (Aka Macy's Birthday!)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MACY WE ALL LOVE YOU  ❤❣♥♡

Teamwork and Mission Progress

Good work yesterday!  You did a great job on the water-themed pipe project.  Everybody understood the problem, you shared ideas and came up with clear roles and a clear plan, and worked well together to save the ping pong ball.  While there was not quite enough fingers and toes to plug all the holes you came very close to getting the job done.  Nice work!

Filling the leaky pipe to get the ping pong ball out

Homework for next week is to come with at least one proposal for a water-related problem to solve.  You don't have to come with a solution, but the problem should be one that you think we might be able to solve within the next two months.  Remember, promising areas often involve the intersection of new technologies: drones, wireless, machine learning, social media, nanotechnologies, etc.

We also prioritized and started working on our robot missions.  The prioritized order we came up with, based on how easy it is to accomplish and how many points it's worth is:

Mission	Points	Difficulty	Total	Rank
Filter	3	3	6	1
Water Well	2.5	3	5.5	2
Faucet	2.5	3	5.5	3
Pipe Removal	2	3	5	4
Pump Addition	2	3	5	5
Pipe Replacement	2	3	5	6
Water Collection	3	2	5	7
Slingshot	2.5	2.5	5	8
Flow	2.5	2	4.5	9
Fountain	2	2.5	4.5	10
Pipe Construction	2	2.5	4.5	11
Sludge	3	1.5	4.5	12
Flower	3	1.5	4.5	13
Fire	2.5	2	4.5	14
Manhole Covers	3	1	4	15
Tripod	2	2	4	16
Rain	2	1.5	3.5	17
Water Treatment	2	1.5	3.5	18

We've already gotten the Filter mission working and are working to simplify it.  (The mot de semaine is "ping" by the way).  We've also got good progress on the Well and the Faucet.  If we had to go to a tournament next week we could probably get 80 points.  Not bad!

Don't forget to check Slack during the week for any updates!

Groundwater Issues and Research Topics

Last week I spoke with Dr. Bernie Kueper.  He's a professor at Queen's and in internationally recognized groundwater expert.  Half of North Americans get their water from groundwater sources.  The the top groundwater problems Dr. Kueper mentioned were:

- Increased water use is draining the groundwater sources faster than they're getting refilled
- Existing sources are getting contaminated by chemicals that are added to foods, cosmetics, fertilizers, etc.
- Finding new sources is difficult

With these problems in mind, useful areas for to research could include:

- Finding ways to reduce water waste
- Finding ways to reduce water contamination
- Finding ways to locate new water sources

He travels a lot, but would be happy to talk to us if he's free some week during our meeting.

In the meantime, a resource he suggested that might be useful for finding water is the gravitational data collected by NASA satellites.  The satellites measure the force of gravity all over the surface of the earth, and track changes over time.  As the underground water level at a location rises and falls, so does the force of gravity at that location.  Dr. Kueper suggested that here may be a way to use that data to find underground water.  The data is available at University of Colorado GRACE research

Welcome to the Hydro Dynamics Season!

Welcome back, Comet Warriors!  Since we're all veteran Lego League participants by now we can hit the ground running.  We've got a lot of work to do this season and not a lot of time to do it. The competition will likely be held in late November at Duncan MacArthur Hall (Queen's West Campus).

We'll be using this blog again this season to keep you informed about news, tips, progress, dates, and so on during the season.  Please check back regularly to make sure you get all the necessary information!  Just like last year, there will be a secret word contained in each week's blog post.  Please show up each week knowing the secret word for the week.  The word for this week is "wasser" (that's German for "water").

Remember that the First Lego League competition consists of three main parts: 1) core values, 2) the project, and 3) the game.  The core values define how we work together as a team, and how we interact with other teams.  If you don't remember what they are, please refresh your memory!  The project is a team research effort in a specific area, with the team required to develop and share a solution to a particular problem.  The game involves the design of a robot to complete as many missions as possible on a specially designed board.

Most participants find the robot component the most fun, but remember that the overall score is based on all three components, with each counting for roughly one third.  Your robot could complete every mission in the game successfully and your team could still finish last overall if you don't do well on the project and don't demonstrate the core values.

To get up to speed quickly on the project and the game, please check out the videos below:

The Project:

The Robot Game:

In the next couple of weeks we'll need to pick a project.  Please think about ways we use water, and any ideas you can come up with for how we could improve the process of locating, extracting, using, or disposing of that water.

As you may remember from last season, and from the Innovation Celebration we went to the season before, new ideas often come from the intersection of new technologies - things like drones, wireless communications, robotics, cloud computing, social media, machine learning, and nanotechnologies.  Could any of these technologies be combined to solve current problems related to water?  Think hard and see what ideas you can come up with for next week.

Also, next week we're hoping to chat via computer with Dr. Bernie Cooper, world-recognized expert on groundwater.  Please bring any water-related questions you may have for him.  See you then!

शुभ दिन धूमकेतु! (Good day Comets)


     At our last meeting we had a special guest from Google Deep Mind in London, Dr Tim Lillicrap. Dr. Lillicrap taught us how to train our convnets to recognize animals such as wildebeests. Dr. Lillicrap also showed us a project his team at Google did where the taught a convnet to go around a virtual house and collect apples. The word of the week is Apples. Dr. Lillicrap's team  also trained a convnet to play GO, a game popular in Asia, better than any other human. You can read about that here.

Tim Lillicrap sharing his knowledge with us

 We also contacted Roy Chan, a computer science major at Stanford University who wrote a paper on training a convolutional network called YOLO (You Only Look Once) to recognize baked goods. We asked him what software he used and how long he would think it would take us to get our project off the ground (ha ha, pun intended 😆) and he told us it would probably take 3-6 months. To read Roy Chan's paper click here. ( Bonus points if you can say the bakery he got his baked goods from.

Also the Ontario East Provincial Championship is in 10 sleeps so everybody need to review their lines and check Slack for any homework. If you are not signed up for Slack, get your parents to check their email (or check your own) so you can get signed up.