Challenged to come up with a way to cover all the angles of a basketball game via remote-controlled cameras, the teams dive into action and compete to prove who's got (the whole) game!
- 1) The Challenge (5:40)
Watch the Show
Bonus Footage
Blue Team's Process
Red Team's Process
- 1) The Challenge (5:40)
- 2) Brainstorm (1:09)
- 3) Design (8:21)
- 4) Build (4:49)
- 5) Test (1:55)
- 6) Judging (6:44)
- 1) Camera's Eye View (00:23)
- 2) The Harder Challenge (00:25)
- 3) Blue Team's Band (01:09)
- 4) Tom the Robot (00:26)
- 5) The Moving Camera (00:34)
- How do you build a camera that can videotape a basketball game from the ground? Blue Team decided to try mounting a camera on a foam tower that that could move along a track.
- The team built the tower from foam pieces and mounted the camera on top of it. They attached the camera tower to a piece of plywood on inline skate wheels to let it move.
- The camera could move back and forth along the track and they used servo motors to tilt and rotate the camera.
- The camera traveled along a wooden track system built on the floor. The moving tower was remote-controlled by the kids standing away from the court.
- They could have built their tower slightly higher to get higher video coverage. Also, with more time, they could have built the track so that it had no gaps or bumps in it.
- The blue team won because their camera held steady and was able to capture smooth footage of the basketball players. It even traveled well over parts of the track that had small gaps.
- How do you build a camera that can videotape a basketball game from above? The red team decided to make a zip line, with the camera attached to wires strung across the basketball court.
- They used a pulley system to move the camera and had two people pull on ropes from either end of the court to move it.
- They also used two servo motors so that the camera could look up and down the court and also left and right.
- The movement of Red Team's camera was human-controlled. It hung suspended from strings attached to pulley systems that were mounted to the basketball hoops.
- Testing showed that the zip line was really shaky so the red team adjusted the parallel ropes of the pulley system to make it more stable.
- Red Team's camera worked, but in the end it was still too shaky because the center of gravity (the point of balance) was far away from the center of rotation (the fixed axis).
Modify your kicking machine in one of two ways.
Build a machine that kicks balls across the floor.