States was Great!

Congratulations Team Proteus on a great job at the NH State competition!  Your dedication and work paid off and we had fun along the way!  And we were featured in an article in a Manchester newspaper - check out the article - Lego teams turn vision into action.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Good Luck at States!

And now a message from the Team Proteus Coaches:

Good luck at States!  You have done a great job this year and have come together as a true team.  For the first time ever, Team Proteus earned an award for the Research Presentation.  First place in fact!

So, no matter how we do at States, you should all be proud of your accomplishments.  And...most of all - have fun!

Here are some pictures from this week's presentation to the 3rd and 4th grade classes!

Knightly News

Here is the latest issue of the Knightly news, our school's newsletter. We were in it! Here's the article.

That's the research project.

We did it!

At the competition this Saturday, we won 1st place for the research project, and we're going to the state competition! We are going to improve our research project even more by:

• Memorizing our lines
• Presenting our project to the PTA
• Trying to have a whole school assembly
• And to decorate the bike

Here's some pictures -

3 Meetings Left!

We only have 3 meetings left! We're almost done with the missions on the other side of the table. Right now we have 75 points.  Last year we had 360 points, but we think we can get some points on the board with our last meetings.  At the last meeting we are going to polish our stuff, and make sure it all works. So we really only have 2 meetings left! The team looks forward to going to UNH, and trying to win it.

Interview with UNH Professor

Last Monday we interviewed University of New Hampshire faculty member Professor Tagliaferro. We interviewed him to find out more about our solution for our research project. 

We talked with him about some kind of bike that could power a T.V. or a computer. If you ride the bike for 20 minutes it will create power to run the T.V. for 15 minutes! That way people could stay in shape without diets, and they can still watch T.V. as long as they have the power to run it!

The power that is made could also be saved and given to someone else who needs power.

Here are the pictures:

Answering a questions from a team member!

Professor Tagliaferro and Team Proteus

Be More Active!

Take the Be More Active Challenge

•Average daily media use for children is 7 hours 38 minutes. 
•1 in 3 children are overweight or obese.

•Less than 1/3 of 15 year olds got 60 minutes of daily activity.  (60 minutes is recommended)

•Only 10% of schools have daily gym classes.

This is our service project.   We're going to give  out these fliers to our classmates and any one who wants them!

Another Mission Finished

We finished another mission. We just finished the Patent and Mechanical Arm mission.  You have to push it to make the arm grab the patent.  Then there's the 1st mission we finished - Ramp and Syringe.  It is to get the syringe to base and to grab the nurse. We completed both of them!

The Project

Every year each team has to do a research and service project to tell your community about a current problem. This year's  theme is about Biomedical Engineering.

Biomedical Engineering means - "Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles and techniques to the medical field. This field seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine. It combines the design and problem solving skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences to improve healthcare diagnosis and treatment."- Wikipedia

So after so brainstorming, research,  and building consensus, we found our topic, and we came up with obesity! We are going to try to find a way for people to know how much food they eat and how much they burn! So you eat 2000 calories a day but you burn only 1500 of them! That's weight gained! So we want to invent an easier way to measure how many calories you eat and how many you burn so you know exactly how much you can eat!

The Challenge

This year's challenge is all about Biomedical Engineering. As you can see from this year's board. (seen below), there are a lot of parts that have to do with the human body.

You can see the Bone, the Heart, Some eyes, And a foot!

But that's not all - you also have the community project which will be in another post!

What is FLL?

FLL stands for first First Lego League. So it's FLL for short. The FLL site says -
"The best way to summarize FIRST LEGO League is to say that it is a robotics program for 9 to 16 year olds (9 to 14 in the US and Canada), which is designed to get children excited about science and technology -- and teach them valuable employment and life skills. FLL can be used in a classroom setting but is not solely designed for this purpose. Teams, comprised of up to ten children with at least one adult coach, can also be associated with a pre-existing club or organization, homeschooled, or just be a group of friends who wish to do something awesome."-FLL 
But if you still wondering what that has to do with Legos, we build Lego robots that compete in challenges!