Ridge View Academy Is A Denver Public Charter School Under Contract With The Colorado Department Of Youth Corrections

Home of The RAMS –

Respect Attitude Motivation & Spirit;

RVA Is A 500 Bed Facility

• RVA Began An Association With FIRST Robotics in 2004

• FIRST – For Inspiration & Recognition Of Science And Technology – Brings Together High School Students For An Intense Competition That Includes A 6– Week Build Period Where Teams Design, Engineer, & Manufacture Their Robot

• Each Year The Competition Is Designed Around A Specific Type Of Challenge

• In 2004, Teams Had To Build A Bot That Could Stack Or Move Small Tetrahedrons Onto Larger Field Tetras

• In The 2005 Competition Named Aim High, Teams Had To Shoot Or Dump 7‖ Nerf Balls Into A Backboard 13 Ft. Tall Or Into A Low Goal

• Beginning In November—December Teams Need To Start Thinking About The January Kick-Off Date When They Receive Their ―Kit-O-Parts‖ And Find Out The Task For That Year

• Considering I Teach Applied Technology, Integrating A Technology Lesson Plan Into The Curriculum Is Almost Humorous –

• One Of The Challenges Each Year For The Rambotix Team Has Been To Get Some Of The Students Involved With Using Auto-CAD, Which Is Available To The Teams For Free

• Unfortunately, We Have Never Been Able To Offer This As A Formal Course And In The Past Two Years We Really Have Not Been Able To Take Advantage of This Technology

. . .soooooo

WOULDN’T IT BE NICE IF –

We Could Take Our Team Design Meetings And Add To The Design Process From This

Into Something More Like This

• Or Perhaps A Little More Realistically Like This

Coupled w/ This

• Because These Guys Want To DO Better and add to the legacy from The Last Two Year’s Robots

• When I Saw The Lego Digital Designer Earlier This Year I Thought, Hey Wait A Minute . . .This Might Actually Be Fun

• So Off To Creating The Lesson Plan And Checking To Make Sure This Would Work

• I First Loaded The Software Onto My Computer In Order To Familiarize Myself With The Software

• Next, I Checked System Requirements To Make Sure It Would Run On My Student Machines

• Minimum System Requirements for PC

• Operating system:

• Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP.

• CPU: 450 MHz Pentium III or faster processor

• Graphics card:

• 16 MB graphics card

• (DirectX 8.0 or higher compatible)

• RAM: 128 MB

• Hard Disk Space: 100 MB

• Then I Loaded The Software On The Classroom Computers

• And I Reloaded It

• Again

• And Again • Uhh Ohh

• So After A Few Days Of Pulling Out My Hair. . . Uhhhh,

• I Changed The Bios Settings And Reallocated 32 Mb VRAM

• Surely This Will Now Work. . And It Did Sorta

• It Took The Software Nearly 15 Minutes To Load

• Well I Figured Out That Even Though My 5 Year-Old Celeron Processors With 128 MB of Ram Met The Requirements, The 8 Mb VRAM Did Not.

• Once Loaded It Actually Functioned –

Like Sap Draining From A Vermont Maple Tree In Winter

& It Seemed To Have A Funny Effect On

Some of My Students

• I Created A Eval Sheet for The Students To Use & Turned Them Loose With The Following Instructions:

• Open The Software & Go To Work. Let Me Know What You Think

• 3 Students Were Able To Spend One Lesson Using The Software And Concluded That:• Moving Pieces In And Out Of The Design Plane

Was Easy

• Overall The Software Was Not Too Difficult To Master

• It Was Cool To Build Legos Instead Of Editing Word Documents And Spreadsheets

• The Students All Asked The Same Question:• When Do We Get To Use The CAD Software to Build

Next Year’s Robot

• I Responded With:• When I Get New Computers!!

Merry Christmas