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.

4 Weeks To Go!

Pozdrav Komete! ( Hello Comets in Croatian)
Last week we were full of Christmas cheer and we shared it with by all by dropping eggs out of a 2nd story window. One team was successful, and one egg splatted to the floor so we were not awarded with marshmallows, but we learned much more important things about teamwork and were able to look beyond the marshmallows.

Egg Drop!

We then split into two groups (Even though a team should never be divided), one of which worked on getting Zone 2 to work, while the other crafted marshmallow (MARSHMALLOW is the werd of the week) hot chocolates and gift tags. These will be sold at the school Bazaar on December 14th.

Reindeer Hot Chocolates

In the end Group One ( one is the true wurd, not marshmallow) did get the animal conservation mission working so we now have an added 40 points!Way to go Group One!

40 pts! Yay!

 Also shoutout to Olivia because she is awesome and wrote this weeks blog entry. 

Our Trip to the Serengeti

      Hello Comets! Last week was our second week back since the Kingston Regional tournament so that means we have 5 weeks left until the provincial tournament that will be held in Oshawa, Ontario on January 14th (more details yet to come).
   
Let us take a moment to recap what we did last week

     A)  Last week we were exposed to the wonders of Serengeti by Virtual Reality and we truly realized how difficult it is to count animals by driving around in a truck.
   

Olivia exploring the Serengeti 

   

Some of the Challenges Counting Animals on the Serengeti

    B) We made reindeer hot chocolates which we plan to sell at the school Christmas Bazaar on December 14th. We plan on making more hot chocolates next week. Keep in mind we will need to make signs and figure out how much we plan on charging.


     C) Hannah, Nicolas, Olivia, Lais and Neshaya worked on programming the second box of the shark transportation so we are now 3 pts ahead! Wohoo!

Pineapple is the combination of letters you will be required to write on your slip of paper Thursday.

   
     D) Tara, Macy and Alyssa worked on painting the wildebeests so we can promote diversity as well as animal conservation throughout the season. (Also so the computer vision systems can identify different wildebeests)

 
     E) Lily was sick so we offer our condolences to her- Our condolences Lily 😪

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