Rob 9-16 IST - Campus do Taguspark 

Entre Janeiro e Junho de 2015, 2 vezes por mês aos Sábados, durante 3 horas, o clube de robótica do IST organiza sessões para aprender a fazer e programar robots. Estas sessões destinam-se a alunos entre os 9 e os 16 anos. Apesar de um robot não ser exactamente um CanSat, tem muitas semelhanças sobretudo nas tecnologias usadas e nos desafios que têm de ser resolvidos. Para mais informações sigam esta ligação.

Xplore Scratch

The Xplorer team is quite fan of Scratch. Citing what is said in the Scratch website here: 

• "With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community.";
• "Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century.";
• "Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.".

For the CanSat competition it is essential to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively, and those abilities can be easily learnt with Scratch.

Scratch is a free fully visual programming environment where essential programming concepts can be learnt in a very easy way, like the concept of variables and cycles.

In the past 20th December 2014 part of the Xplorer team attended to a three-hour Scratch workshop which was quite enlightening and useful. It is now a goal of the Team that all its members (students and teachers) attend to this workshop. This was the game made by one of us in this three-hour workshop: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/40786700/#player. OK it is a bit primitive, but on our behalf it must be noticed that this game was developed in a three-hour workshop, while leaning Scratch, and when previously our knowledge of Scratch was absolutely none.

Even though Scratch is a fully visual programming environment/language, which usually are seen like serving only for fun and for teaching kids, Scratch in fact has lots of potential, look for instance the following examples implemented exclusively through Scratch:

• Complete game that we could see in any mobile platform, here;
• Example of integration with the computer camera, here.

If you have interest in Scratch, understand that the programming environment is totally free (you just have to join Scratch by registering in their website) and that there is lots of free (and paid) documentation/tutorials. In February 2015 a free online course will start here.

Enjoy!

Kick-Off of the Xplorer project

In the past 20th December 2014 the Xplorer team met in the Colégio Sagrado Coração de Maria - Lisboa to kick-off the participation of the Xplorer team in the 2015 CanSat Portugal competition, aiming ultimately the 2015 European CanSat Competition. It was a very fruitful meeting where all the team participants (students and teachers) had the opportunity to get to know each other better, and where very important topics were discussed and agreed:

• Each team member (teachers included) presented themselves, their professional/academic background, and their motivation; personal contacts were exchanged;
• The teachers presented:
• an overview of the CanSat competition in the world, in Europe and in Portugal;
• the most important milestones of the Portuguese and European 2015 CanSat competition;
• the organisation of the team;
• the needed material;
• an introduction to the selected programming language.
• It was agreed:
• the goal(s) of the team;
• regular meetings with definition of dates and location;
• the programming language to be used in the software part of the project;
• which software/versions will be used, programming editors and installation tips;
• the main training courses to attend to were discussed and agreed;
• communication means were discussed and agreed: Dropbox (internal to the team), (this) blog, facebook, others. 
• The next meetings were defined

The Xplorer team passed the first phase of the competition

In the past 16th December 2014 we have received an e-mail from ESERO Portugal informing us that the Xplorer team had passed to the second phase of the selection process towards the 2015 CanSat Portugal competition. The whole team was very happy with this e-mail, which was seen as a Christmas gift in advance.

Now the next steps are:

• [2015/01/10-2015/01/11]: mandatory teacher's workshop; the team teacher's already attended this workshop in 2014 and so they are dispensed from attending it; anyway they are still evaluating if they will participate or not; the decision will depend more on the team needs; More information regarding this workshop can be found here;
• [2015/01/16]: this is the deadline to fill-in a report that must be delivered to the competition organisation in the following of the teacher's workshop;
• [2015/01/23]: it will be announced the teams that will be allowed to participate in the 2015 CanSat Portugal competition; each one of those teams will receive a free CanSat kit.

Our team, as well as all other team's, will have to obey to the  rules establish in the competition regulation.

Until the 23rd January 2015, much work is in front t of us: a more detailed definition of what our CanSat will be, and accompanied and on-the-job (self) training on relevant topics like Electronics/Arduino and programming.