A month ago, Richelle had no desire to enter anything in fair. I told her that if she didn't enter, she didn't go to fair at all because of the entrance fee. With her as an exhibitor and me as a leader, we can get $4 bracelets that get us into the fair the entire week. I told her that I wasn't going to pay the entrance fee just so she could go when she wanted to...and she was planning to go at least three days at $12 each day.
Well. Now she's entered in not one, not two, but three areas; robotics demonstration, graphic design, and a display.
She's been working on a picture of a cat's face on the computer so she only has to finish that. She's pretty good with the paint program and even added a tiny splash of white to the pupils to show sparkle. Shading is the next item on her list.
Her display is of a two-story Lego house along the lines of a doll-house built for Lego people. She's almost finished with that after two solid days of building, dismantling, and building again. It looks pretty nice. The attic is authentically filled with the odds and ends you would expect an attic to be filled with - a raft, oars, life jackets, a medieval horse blanket, a wagon wheel (although that would more normally be found in the rafters of a barn), a door, etc. There's a rooftop deck with railing off to one side and a yard with trees and bushes in back.
Her demonstration grew out of a "wouldn't it be fun-" talk we had a week or so ago. As in, "Wouldn't it be fun if we had a Lego robot and programmed it to deliver breakfast to guests in their rooms?" So she built a basic robot from plans out of a book (the robot belongs to the 4-H club), modified it to carry a tray and added a sensor. Then she worked on a program so the robot would wait for the breakfast tray to be put into place, deliver it to the bedroom door (it has to be a mock-up because I'm not taking my house to the fair), and stop at the door saying "good morning" repeatedly until the tray is removed. It would then say "thank you" and return to base, wait for the second tray to be placed, and deliver it in the same manner.
Mike suggested loading the tray with milk and cookies and have the judges stand at the "guest room" end of her demonstration table. A little bribery, he says, goes a long way.
She's done a great job with the programming and it works. Now she just needs to fine-tune it and cut out unnecessary move blocks. In several places she has three blocks where one would do the same job. The judges look for efficiency in programming because the more program, the more memory used and more things that could glitch. She also needs to modify the platform for the tray because there's nothing to keep the tray from sliding off and crashing to the floor. Not good for the computer, the demonstration table, or the milk and cookies.
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