Category: Francesca

07.23.12 – Meeting with the Teachers

On Monday, I met with Angelica and Regina again to work out some of the problems they’d experienced on Friday. We dealt with Bluetooth problems first, then moved on to Michael’s calibration program. I managed to get the program working in Calico with some tips from Michael, then showed them how to use it. The teachers then discussed how this… Read more →

07.13.12 – First Meeting with Teachers

Last Friday, I met with the Los Alisos teachers, Angelica Gunderson and Regina Snyder for the first time. I really enjoyed working with them and learning about their experience with robotics education. They already had Calico installed and were able to connect to the robot, so we focused on writing a simple program for the Scribbler. I asked them to… Read more →

07.13.12 – Second Demonstration

Today we held a second public demonstration. We had originally intended to demo both the Pleos and the Scribblers, but unfortunately there were few people around to demo to. That said, the Pleo demonstration seemed successful – people were interested in the little dinosaurs and curious about how they worked. For the short time I was there, I observed two… Read more →

Observations, Demo to Roommates

On June 20th, I demoed the Scribbler robot to my two roommates, Jennifer and Helen. Both are female university students with no robotics or programming experience. I believe the robot I was using at the time was Wall-E. Because I had just received the robot, I hadn’t programmed anything complex, but I had the robot draw simple shapes (square, circle,… Read more →

C++ in Calico – Intro Reading

Because Myro-C++ is unsupported for Windows and quite difficult to use, Team Scribby has discussed writing C++ files for Calico. I definitely think this idea is better over the long-term because it gives us more control and would probably be easier for inexperienced programming students to use. I have been looking at the source code for Calico, particularly at the… Read more →

Preliminary Questions, Second Demo

Question: How do people react to the Scribbler robots? What do people with various levels of programming experience want to do with the robots? Hypothesis: We think that people with previous programming experience or a strong interest in robotics will be more likely to participate in the demonstrations, and that attracting people who are not already interested in robotics will… Read more →

Observations, First Demo

Today we ventured onto campus for some interactive heidi montag sex tape online research! We set up a demonstration of the Pleos and Scribblers in front of the USC bookstore in the hopes of attracting the attention of passersby. Fortunately, there was plenty of interest, particularly in the Pleos. People of all ages, but particularly children and young adults, wanted… Read more →

Troubleshooting: Scribbler Serial Port Not Recognized in Calico (Mac OS X)

Yesterday I was finally able to fix an ongoing problem – Calico couldn’t recognize the Scribblers’ serial ports. I could see that the robot was connected via Bluetooth, with a serial port named “scribbler”. Googling the problem revealed a variety of solutions, but disconnecting and reconnecting, using a different robot, and even reinstalling the software did nothing to fix it.… Read more →