Model Rockets

Hi Everyone!

Sorry, long time no post. Schedules have been busy so there have been a few events that have changed up the Tech Club schedule a bit.

Last Tuesday we drew some models of bottle rockets we will build from pop bottles and card board once the weather starts getting warmer. Here are some of the models we created last week.

Tech Club Member Charles Interviewed For WCRX Public Service Announcement

Whoa - how cool is this?

Chicago Columbia University's WCRX radio interviewed Tech Club member Charles Hill, who talked a bit about the Cabrini Connections program. Take a listen!

Here's the 60 second version:



And here's the shorter 30 second version:

History of Video Games

Hi Everyone!

Last week on Tuesday we did some research on the history of video games. A couple of weeks before that we started to create our own video games. Here is an example done by one of the students:



Here is a brief bit of what we learned about some of the very first video games ever:

Computer space
A game created just for fun
1971 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney

Tennis for Two
1959

Missile Simulator
Locate a missile target
1947 Ray Mann.

This week we will keep looking at the history of video games and start researching how to design our own model rockets from pop/soda bottles.

Hey Tech Fans. We need your support

This year's Cabrini Madness tourney has 13 teams of students and volunteers raising money for Cabrini Connections. The team that raises the most by the end of the NCAA Basketball Tournament wins.

Right now Team Five Dragons, which features Tech Club members and Mapping for Justice supporters, is in last place! You can change that with a donation (here) and by asking friends, family, co-workers and tech supporters to give and to blog about the tourney.

Money raised helps keep Cabrini Connections and tech club available to our teens.

Violinist at Tech Club

Tuesday night Tech Club had a very special treat. Engineer, violinist, and entrepreneur Andrew Forde from Toronto visited and spoke about his love of engineering, music and creativity.

Andrew is in his last semester at the University of Toronto, finishing his degree in Nanoengineering. Nanoengineering studies materials at the nano level to find properties one would desire in a material, but from the perspective of some of the smallest pieces that make up that material.

Expanding off of his engineering background Andrew has launched a new company, Sommerfeld Solutions, that implements innovative ideas for other companies. He explained, while nanoengineering is an interest of his, that the research environment doesn't fit with his need to be creative, which is one of his reasons for starting his company.

Since he was four years old he has played the violin, and actually went to an arts high school, not the typical place you would expect a typical engineer to come from. He has released one album, and will be working on a second album in Summer 2011. We were fortunate that Andrew was able to bring his violin and play three songs for us after his talk.

You can check out his music at his YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/violintheory.



Pictures to come this weekend from the event! Special thanks to Cabrini Connections for hosting the event, and to Andrew Forde for sharing his story with Tech Club.

Tech Club Special Guest | Music & Science

Tuesday, February 22, Tech Club will have a very special guest all the way from Toronto, Canada. University of Toronto engineering student and entrepreneur Andrew Forde will be giving a special talk at Tech Club Tuesday night to play some contemporary music and to talk about how music and science and engineering are all related. Please join us for what will be a fun and engaging event!

Trucks Computer Games & Science

What does a truck computer game and science have in common? Well, on Tuesday we found out. Jordan is learning about graphing points in math, and he was playing a computer game before Tech Club where you drive a truck off a ramp and the game records how far and high the truck goes.

We wanted to see if the game world's gravity worked like gravity in the real world. Assuming the speed is about the same for each case, the higher an object is thrown, the less far it will go in distance away from the spot it was thrown. Also, the further an object is thrown, the less high it will go. We played the truck game 10 times and recorded the height and distance data.

After recording all of the data, we entered the information into excel and made a graph with it so we could see if the game had a direct relationship between how far the truck went and how high it went. The speed was not recorded in this game.
We found there was no direct relationship in the video game between how far the truck went in height to how far it went in distance.












For the rest of the time we did some more experimentation with the Alice programming software before we get started on the first level of our video games. Jordan added a warehouse and had a train car crash into the wall of the warehouse.



After this week, we will be doing one science experiment each Tech Club meeting. It should be exciting. Also, we will be fundraising for Tech Club very soon to get more resources so we can expand the experiments and projects we cover. Stay tuned to this space to learn how you can donate!

Looking to the Past and the Future

Tuesday at Tech Club we did three main things:

1. Learn about the contributions African Americans have made to science and technology
2. Discuss what classes are helpful to take in high school to prepare for science and engineering programs in college
3. Work more with Alice, the programming tool, to learn more about how to add stationary objects and how to make the moving objects interact with them

We read several of the bios on http://cr4.globalspec.com/blog/128/National-Society-of-Black-Engineers-Blog, to learn about African Americans in science and engineering. One person who stuck out was George Washington Carver, but not because he invented peanut butter. Things we didn't know about him were that his parents died when he was young and had to move from home to home, and sometimes the area he moved to didn't have a high school that would allow African Americans to attend. Fortunately the people he lived with then payed for him to have a tutor. I also learned he did not initially go to college for science, but for art. It wasn't until he transferred to Iowa State University did he study this in college. He was the first African American to attend Iowa State, and eventually went on to become a faculty member, until Tulane University offered him a job on their faculty and great research opportunities.

After we spent some time reading and discussing these important figures in the history of science and engineering, we talked about some of my first year college experiences with math and programming in the University of Michigan engineering program. I shared which classes I took, or didn't take in high school that helped me, or could have helped me during that first year of college. I felt the two most important areas of study to have a solid foundation in for the first year of college were math and programming, though many high schools do not offer programming courses.

Lastly, we did some Alice programming. Sean built a mini city and added a few characters and had a dragon flying off of one of the sky scrapers.

Next week we hope to do some more programming with Alice, and talk about how Facebook newsfeed works and how people make games for Facebook. That's all for now! See you next week!

New Quarter, New Tech Club, And 3D Programming

Tech Club has been going through some transitions, so sorry we haven't been updating frequently, but you will see many more updates soon about Tech Club. This quarter Tech Club will be focusing on learning some computer programming with the help of a really awesome program named Alice and we will be learning more about careers in science and technology as well as looking at some cool experimental technology people are working on.

Today with the program Alice, we mainly experimented with the objects and did some simple movements with them. Specifically we did some simple flying movements with the red dragon in the picture for this post.

In addition to working with Alice today, we learned about a biomedical engineering student and a civil engineering student on www.egfi-k12.org. Here is one of the students we learned about today:




In addition to learning about different types of science/tech/engineering majors, we learned about some interesting things people have done with technology, specifically, this lego printer:



Possibly in the future we will be doing our own projects with Legos, but that will probably be next quarter. We are excited to do more with Alice programming next week and learn more about what cool new things are going on in technology!