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!