Photos from robot camp

Chloe with friend Sarah (left); they got to be in the same small group

Our friend Sean, Sarah's brother, working on a bot with a vertical conveyor that he used to pick up balls from the floor by pressing them against a wall in a game where you tried to get balls to the other team's side of the wall under a time limit

I envy the kids the chance to do robot camp...not least because they played capture the flag when they had breaks

Notice the manly choir shirt on my boy Ethan here. You can't actually read anything into it since his attire is mostly random but we're happy he does enjoy choir so much.

What, me, mad scientist? I'm going into zoology. This robo stuff is just a sideline.

Ethan and Chloe went to robot camp last week. Chloe's group focused on Lego NXT robots, while Ethan tried a new-to-us system called Vex, which has erector-set-style parts, and a brain that can control 8 to 10 motors. On Friday they had a showcase with some battlebot-style games; it was a lot of fun.

These photos are all by our friend Twila.

Chloe was ready to kill something because her robot didn't work the way she wanted when she displayed it in autonomous mode. I had to trot out a story about my own time at camp, when a program I wrote screwed up on a big screen in a big auditorium. I may have embellished a little.

Chloe came home from day one of camp and started building things with our Lego NXT set, and it was a lot of fun to see her play with programming it.