robots

We continue to work with our Lego Robolab kits. While researching for this unit, I have found one college that uses the same kits to teach some pretty advanced engineering principles. The picture above is of a gearbox the students built. I found it on one of the college websites.There are seven gears in the gear box, all connected, some with 8 teeth, some with 24. We turned gear A, then gear B, and the results were very interesting. Gear A is pretty hard to turn by hand, but makes gear B spin rapidly. Gear B is very easy to turn, but makes gear A turn only very slowly.
We have only scratched the surface obviously, but some good basic principles have been learned.

humbug!

We have been reading Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol the past three weeks, and we should finish it this week. It is a favorite story of mine, and the group has really enjoyed the telling of the story, and are working very hard with an excellent abridged text I have found. I hope they will want to return to this story every year to enjoy its pure and timeless charms.

city lights

This blog has been pretty quiet recently, but I hope to be a little more regular in the weeks and months ahead. We just finished our unit on light and color, which was great fun, and really opened my eyes. We will build on our knowledge of light and color and continue to work with Jeff Beaudry at USM on future projects relating to analysis of plants' health.
There is no real connection between this post and the picture above; your correspondent is an avid photographer and happens to like this one. And we are using Chapin's City Lights for our writing prompts...

football season

All the students are involved now in the socer team, coached by Conrad Strack and myself. We train three times a week, and they all seem to enjoy the game very much. We traveled down to Rhode Island last week to play a side that had more experience, which was the main difference between the two teams. Traveling to away games is also a great chance for my students to mix with other students, as the GBSD team is drawn from the students at Portland High School and deaf students from mainstream schools. We have another month of our season to go, which ends with the New England tournament.

why is it what it is?

My love of the bicycle is well known: it, and the Voyager spacecraft, wherever they are now, are twin peaks in the history of transportation.
Another man who loves bicycles is the engineer and inventor Dr. Alex Moulton. In the 1950s he bought a high-end 'traditional' 10 speed bike, and marveled at how wonderful it was to ride.
But Dr. Moulton the engineer got off the thing and studied it with his highly critical mind. He analyzed its 'architecture'; its geometry, the sizing of its wheels, everything, asking himself: 'why is it what it is?'
He developed and carefully tested new theories, and produced his first Moulton bicycle in 1962. It had small wheels, suspension, and no top bar. It was more effcient than traditional bikes, and truly unisex. It was an odd looking machine, but became as much an icon of the 1960s as the Beatles.
Then in the late 1990s Dr. Moulton returned to his invention, bringing the same analytical approach, the same testing of ideas and theories, and the same engineering genius.
The result can be seen in the picture above. The Moulton New Series, with its intricate web of a frame and Flexitor suspension, is a thing of beauty, and, by all accounts, a joy to ride.
Dr. Moulton is clearly a man who never kneels before received wisdom, but will subject it to his sharp and critical mind. He is a fine example to anyone, and I like his question 'why is it what it is?' almost as much as one of the answers to it, the fabulous New Series bicycle.

night vision

This is another picture from the photonics lab, which I like very much. Mr. Chapman pointed a very 'weak' flashlight at all of us: in the darkened room it did not illuminate anything or anyone. But when we stood in front of the video camera, the same light - infrared - produced this bright and pretty clear image on the screen. This is the same technology used in 'night vision'.

light and color

On June 5th we drove up to Bangor to visit the Photonics Laboratory at the United Technologies Center. The word Photonics means anything to do with light. Although we spent several hours driving there and back, there is no doubt it was well worth it. Mr. Ralph Chapman runs the lab, and he showed us some wonderful experiments. In the picture above, he is holding a filter that blocks out light, but the heat from the bulb passed through and was able to leave a clear impression on a heat sensitive pad just out of this picture. This and other similar experiments - which I photographed extensively - will really help with clarifying the concepts we will be studying in this unit.