I worked the Engineering Educators' Conference this past week in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's been about 10 years since I've been to Salt Lake, and that was at a winter conference where everything was buried in snow, so it was very different to visit in summer. The downtown area was very, very clean, because Temple Square, a 10-acre complex owned by the Church of Latter-day Saints, sits right in the middle. Temple Square is Utah's most popular tourist attraction bringing in more visitors than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone.
I got up early one morning to sketch one of the churches, but didn't get much more than a pen and ink drawing before the maintenance workers with leaf blowers ran me off. I guess that's how they keep it so immaculate-looking.
The Engineering conference is one of my favorite ones to work, because they always sponsor an interesting robot contest for community college students. In this year's game, the robots were supposed to scoop up white and yellow ping pong balls from the hexagon spaces on the playing field, separate the balls by color, and then deposit them into the 4 corners of the table.
This robot was good at picking up the balls, but not very good at sorting (it put both colors in the same corner). At least the robot was able to get the balls in the corner. Many of the robots shot the balls over the side onto the floor.
I thought this robot had a really clever apparatus for sorting. When I asked the students where they purchased this piece, they told me they designed it themselves and 3-D printed it. When I looked a little closer, I noticed that almost every robot had at least one 3-D printed part. This contest has come a long way from the time when students built robots out of cardboard and duct tape.
We had some robots on display in our booth (the little blue mBots). The #1 robot was supposed to "talk" to the #2 robot. Every 30 seconds, the #1 robot would lower a gate (the kind like you see at railroad crossings) and tell the #2 robot to stop driving around the black-line track. After another 30 seconds, #1 would tell #2 to go. The #3 robot was meant for conference attendees to drive with a remote controller on the iPad. However, we had to watch the robots carefully, because if someone turned #3 towards #1 right when it was giving the "go" signal, #3 would drive off the table. I felt like I was babysitting at a preschool.
Our most popular display was a bionic hand. We put sensors on the fingers and thumb of the black glove, so when you bent the fingers of your hand, it would bend the fingers on the bionic hand. The bionic fingers were very colorful, because they were made out of Slurpy straws. I am always amazed at the things kids are doing in schools these days. Violet starts kindergarten this fall, so it will be interesting to see how much of this filters down to her level.
