VEX Robots at Carman-Ainsworth

I attended the VEX robot competition at Carman-Ainsworth schools on Saturday, October 17th - it was a blast! Students from around the region demonstrated their engineering prowess as they duelled with other teams.



Clinton Bolinger, a coach and owner of Lapeer based company "The Robot Space", along with adult mentors and student competitors from many of the teams filled me in on what it takes to compete in the VEX league.



I'll be looking up Mike Martus, Regional Support Manager for the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, to apply for matching grant funds as we begin our team in New Lothrop!

How do you get to Mars?

watch all eight NASA videos in this series... Mars Playlist

Students interested in forming an Imagine Mars Team... investigate the link below

http://mars.nasa.gov/imagine/leaders/getting_started/overview.html

then come find Mr. Delemeester to start the journey!

The Kilogram

Did you know that the kilogram is the only SI base unit that is still directly defined by an object - the International Protoype Kilogram?  I was thinking about the kilogram this evening as I was grading the 3-2-1 reflection assignment.

The image below shows the current International Prototype Kilogram
(under two glass jars for protection)

http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/img/mass/prototype.jpg

 According to Wikipedia...

..."three other base units (Cd, A, mol) and 17 derived units (N, Pa, J, W, C, V, F, Ω, S, Wb, T, H, kat, Gy, Sv, lm, lx) in the SI system are defined relative to the kilogram, so its stability is important. Only 8 other units do not require the kilogram in their definition: temperature (K, °C), time and frequency (s, Hz, Bq), length (m), and angle (rad, sr)."

 A silicon sphere is a potential replacement for the Kilogram standard

http://www.nist.gov/pml/si-redef/images/SiliconSphere-Closeup-800_1.png

According to a document on the NIST webpage...

..."the international metrology community has chosen to answer those questions by defining the kilogram in terms of either a silicon sphere or an invariant of nature called the Planck constant for its discoverer, Max Planck, one of the pioneers of quantum science."

Maybe one of my students will  have a job at the NIST some day and help to redefine one of the basic quantities we use for measurement in science!