Hello Team Terror!
Hard to believe, but this was the last official Tech Terrors session…doesn’t it feel like we just started!? Either I’m in some kind of time loop… or maybe we’ve just been having the BEST time!?
Our Robo Disco was a roaring success… we had a dance-crew of 5 EZ-Robots networked together so that they could do suitably robotic and synchronized gyrations!
I then turned the programming over to our terrors. Some opted to knock their robots off our TerrorHQ network and take the reins themselves, using a tablet app to control them by hand… others were curious about how the programming worked and so I walked them through the basics (there’s a scratch drag and drop, and a text based programming interface for EZ-builder.) The kids skipped the Scratch and dove straight into the code… quickly teaching the robots some new moves of their own… as their friends called out requests… handstands were popular!
Nobody wanted to give up on the Tech Autopsies, so a number of terrors were elbow deep in dissections before the robots had finished their first dance number! One of the more popular victims… an old Playstation 3!
The PS3 includes something called a cell processor…this baby is so powerful that one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the IBM Roadrunner, uses it as well! In fact, the US Airforce connected 1700 playstations together and built their own super computer! Here’s a link to the brochure they made for the ribbon cutting ceremony of what they called their Condor Supercomputer!:
The Terrors have been very eager to bring some salvaged parts home with them, so I’ve been letting them take anything that didn’t look too spiky or injury inducing… if you see odd bits and pieces coming home with them, ask them what they’ve got and what they are… if they don’t know, I’ll be happy to remind them!
Our Rainbow, electric-pump-activated-cloud-and-tree-planter-irrigation-system went into build mode… two bags of cotton balls were hot glued to a nice white round, cloudish, ramen bowl that I dug out of the kitchen recycling…much to my wife’s chagrin…but the Terrors have transformed it into the cuddliest cloud a tree could ever wish for!
The ladies spent quite some time discussing the very best dimensions for the rainbow …made out of “perfectly good” cardboard that someone had “just thrown in the recycling bin!”… it seems my geek trash adventures are catching on with the Terrors…sorry folks!
We’re hoping for at least one more Tech Terrors when we get back from the Break… and I will be filming a series of Tech Terror inspired videos if any of the kids have an interest in being a part of that, please let me know!
Thank you all so much for having the best Tech Terrors a geek like me could wish for… and have an amazing March Break!