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!
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 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!
Wednesday, 4 January 2017
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.
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.
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 😪
1) We talked about what we had accomplished up through the regional tournament and each came up with "two stars and a wish" - that is, two things we thought we did well this season, and one thing we'd like to work on some more. Between now and the provincial tournament we're going to try to make more progress on the "wishes".
2) We learned how to make and edit 3D models using a program called Sculptris. Remember, if we're going to train a computer to recognize particular animals, we need to give it lots of examples to learn from. Those examples can't all be the same. They have to have enough variety that the computer can learn to tell the animal we're looking for from other animals and non-animals. We bought a bag of toy cows to train the computer on what cows look like, but the cows in the bag were all identical. That won't work because the computer will think all cows are exactly the same. So instead we got a 3D model of a wildebeest and each took turns putting it in different poses to get some variety. Since last week we printed out all the different animals on our 3D printer, as you can see below.
Ten Wildebeest designed by the Comet Warriors
With wildebeest models in a dozen different sizes and poses we can now do a better job teaching the computer what to expect.
3) Running the robot. At the tournament, Olivia (also le mot de la semaine), Lily, and Macy were responsible for running the robot. Last week they worked to teach others how to line up and run the robot, change attachments, switch missions, and so on. Hopefully, by the end of the season everyone will know how to do this.
4) Planned our next fundraiser. We plan to sell reindeer hot chocolate kits at the school Christmas party. This was very successful last year so we're going to try it again. We'll spend some time this week on putting the kits together.
Homework for this week:
1) Take a look at the Grevy's Zebra Website This site explains how the Grevy's Zebra Trust did a census of zebras in Kenya. It involved a lot of driving around with cameras. A group at Princeton then used computers to try to tell one zebra from another based on the pattern of stripes on their hip. The woman who runs the Grevy's Zebra Trust, Belinda Mackey, is one of the people we shared our research with. The video below is a talk she gave in San Francisco in October. It's half an hour long. It's worth watching, but if you don't have time for the whole thing watch at least the last six minutes - starting at 25:00. It gives great examples of how to get people involved in conservation. It's not as simple as showing up with a new technology.
Belinda Mackey's talk on Zebra Conservation
Lastly, some good news from one of our experts! When we had our yard sale in October, John Abrams stopped by and was interested in what we were doing. He has a friend, Tim Lillicrap, who works for Google Deep Mind in London, England. Well John put us in touch with Tim, and Tim has offered to come visit us on Dec. 22, the last meeting of the year. Tim works on some of the coolest machine learning stuff in the world (like teaching robots to dream) and is interested to see what we're up to. Maybe he can give us some ideas on how to make it better.
