The 2nd Session of our Fall 2018 READesign program at the High River Library was a lot of fun!

Sphero robots and programming were where we began the afternoon, with the challenge from the first 4 chapters of “In Plane Sight” by Franklin W. Dixon to navigate along the ‘last known heading’ for the stolen airplane using polar coordinates with reference to true north!

Vance and our volunteer Jen had a great time trying to get the library’s Sphero robots to follow the plane through our ‘flight path’ complete with large trees, mountains, clouds, ‘runway beacons’ and … a tunnel. Driving the robots manually worked fairly well, and then we moved on to programming using both the Draw and Block functions of the Sphero Edu App. A few iterations later, Vance had programmed his way through the course (with a few minor setbacks, of course)!

Flight Path and hidden stolen plane – runway beacons, tunnel, clouds, and a large tree…

Vance’s program – navigation using polar coordinate angles, speed, and time = distance!

Vance’s program – Sphero ‘happy dance’ at the stolen plane

For the second part of the afternoon session, we headed over to the computers and logged in to TinkerCAD (a free 3D CAD program from AutoDesk) and started designing our action figure that will be used to complete the challenge next week. Students should read to at least the end of Chapter 8 to guess the challenge based on problems the Hardy Boys face in these chapters for the next session.

Here’s a preview of one of the designs printing prototype #1…

See you next week!