TEAM DUCT TAPE

Team Duct Tape is deeply grateful to PTC for their recent donation to the team. We’re looking forward to employing Pro/ENGINEER in this season’s design process and we appreciate the monetary donation to help defray our community based team’s expenses.  Thank you, PTC!

FTC Florida Kickoff Party and Game Sensor Workshop-Saturday, September 12 at 1:00 pm, Orange County 4H Extension Education Center in Orlando.   Visit the Florida FTC website for more information: http://www.flfirst.org/Kickoff2009.shtml

Team Duct Tape’s rarin’ to go!

Week Two Grads

Week two wrapped up with campers showing some super programming and building skills, managing to complete several missions on the Climate Change field before the end of the day. They also got to try their hands at driving Team Duct Tape’s FTC robot.

Campers are excited about Monday’s mini-tournament at Jimmy Keel Public Library,

Celebrating Success!

in Tampa, where they’ll get a chance to run head to head with last week’s campers in a scaled down version of an FLL tournament.

Each team will be given a basic robot, and they’ll have an hour and a half to build attachments and program.  Teams will also experience team work and technical interviews with a panel of parent judges to round out their compeition introduction.  And then they’ll run some timed matches.

We’ll have some informational displays on hand,  including  Team Duct Tape’s robot and an FTC field, FLL team displays and lots of information about FIRST robotics.

We’re excited, too, and looking forward to a fun day celebrating all our FLL campers!

Trying out Team Duct Tape's FTC robot

Since we’re all about NXTs these days, the Robotic Realm’s news of the new Mindstorms NXT 2.0 is particularly exciting. According to the Robotic Realm, the new kit includes 42 more pieces, a color sensor sensitive to different light intensities (no doubt the “new sensor” alluded to in the new FTC kit of parts list [...]

Eager Programmers
…Literally, since it just hasn’t stopped raining all week!  The only place to be is indoors exercising brain power, which is exactly what our Week II campers have been doing.
Students are learning to work together, plan together, communicate and cooperate.  The biggest challenge is often just communicating ideas from which to develop a group [...]

One of our FLL campers, hard at work
Success without Limits!
In Engineers of the Future,  the latest issue of Oprah magazine takes a look at some all female FIRST teams, in FLL,  FTC,  and FRC, who are transforming traditional views of women in engineering and technology fields.  Check out the Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies, the FemBots [...]

Exploring the Possibilities
Our second FLL Summer Camp is underway this week, with another eager crop of students.  Three of the girls from last week’s camp are joining us as junior camp counselors to inject some gender equity into this week’s all boy group, creating a nice mix of energy, enthusiasm and insight to the camp [...]

Week one FLL Camp Graduates
Our first week of FLL summer camp ended with a group of happy campers!  Students spent the last day of camp trying their hands and minds at solving some of last season’s FLL Climate Change challenges.   It was a good exercise in the importance of keeping things simple, as they explored [...]