A resource for grants might be http://www.techpointfoundation.org/ as they are also involved with FIRST and Purdue and have made donations to the Jefferson HS FIRST Program. Roger was involved with that grant.

Ok gang,
I spent about 3.5 hrs running all over the local area and hit up the following stores,
Ace Hardware
Walmart (all three of them)
Menards (Laf. and W. Laf)
Von Tobels
The Home Depot
Lowes

and here's what I've learned,
1) The Home Depot, Menards, and Lowes take in written requests and take about a month for them to process as they go up to corporate for the final determination.
2) Ace and Von Tobels are able to respond in a few days to a week.
3) Walmart has many different ways to help out the local community and all require a written request,

1. They can hand out gift cards pretty easily in smaller denominations and multiple stores can be asked.


2. They have a matching grant program where they will match what you raise outside their store during some sort of fund drive (cookies, drinks, purchases, etc) and this is something that is easier for them to do but I believe it requires the ok from corporate.


3. They have a donation grant that has to go to corporate and takes about a month or longer.

Anyhow, Walmart has many tiers of their donation program and it appears that we would be wise to ask for donations months in advance to have the funds ready for the program when we get to it.

That said, I was able to raise $150 (3 x $50 gift cards) by going to each of the Walmarts with a letter explaining what we are doing with the program.

I would encourage the teachers to keep the lines of communications open with the local businesses as they are definitely willing to help but requests need to be made well in advance as they have budgetary issues to consider. It appears that the stores have a budget to work with each quarter and so I'm sure that your chances of getting a program funded is better at the beginning of the quarter than at the end. While at each of the establishments it became apparent from the thank you notes that quite a few of the local schools and organizations contact these businesses.

I'll be hearing back from all the stores except Walmart after the break. I'd like to have some volunteers for putting together a thank you letter for these stores with a photo of the robots and kids.

Stores that have donated,
Walmart - West Lafayette - $50
Walmart - Lafayette (on 26) - $50
Walmart - Lafayette (S side) - $50

Welcome everyone - feel free to post your thoughts and comments here.

We had the following to-do items on our list,
a) locate the whereabouts of the equipment, software, laptops, thumbdrives, etc
b) modify the programming to eliminate binary control of the motor speeds/direction
c) purchase additional Vex crystals
d) investigate if ordinary crystals can be used to expand the available frequencies
e) inquiring about available funds to purchase additional accessories (vision system, pneumatics system, etc)
f) inquire about purchasing tool boxes to house the equipment in a more permanent fashion
g) inquire about the missing parts of the original box that was sent over (remote control, wheels, etc)
h) find a place to store the materials and create some sort of check-out system for the materials
i) contact MEs at Purdue as a resource for future years. I know Dr. Chiu well enough and I'm thinking of creating a link between Tecumseh and Purdue so that Prof. Chiu and Prof. Meckl can have their students make themselves available to teach the programming when I'm not around.

Roger, can you let me know the answers to (a), (e), (f), (g)
Melissa, can you work with Brett and the other teachers about storing
the equipment and creating a checkout sheet
I'll work on (b), (c), (d), and (i)

Hello Roger,
I'm writing because I thought of a way to simplify the programming of the robots that might be useful to minimize the debugging due to the fact that one motor needs to go clockwise while the other needs to go counterclockwise to go forward or reverse. We could write separate loops that handle

FWD
REV
RIGHTTURN
LEFTTURN

and each of these routines could look for input such as the amount of time required for the command and which motors are being used. In other words, we could provide a more complex program template that has all of this logic at the bottom of it and the students would only need to worry about the details near the top so their code might look like,

FWD (400) - go fwd for 400 milliseconds
REV (200) - backup for 200 milliseconds
RIGHTTURN (25) - make a right "tank turn" for 25 milliseconds
FWD (800) - go fwd for 800 milliseconds

when each one of these commands gets read it would go to the subroutines discussed above to make the move and then return back into the program to receive the next instruction. Anyhow, I've got to look into downloading and installing that programming environment to see if I can make this work but it "should" be doable. The entirety of the program would be more complex but the students wouldn't need to see it all to understand it - they would only need to work within the boundaries we create at the top of the program.
Thanks,
Nino

I was thinking of creating a lesson or two where we have the kids "act out" the program. They could be part of a while loop and pass on the sequence of events to the other students to see if the code works like it should. I think this would be really fun and help them see why the code isn't behaving the way that they think it would. We could have them complete a super-simple task by acting it out.