LEGO.com MINDSTORMS Meet the MDP's Katherine Anderson

Katherine Anderson
From:
Victoria, Canada

What I do besides building with MINDSTORMS:
Part time administrator but mostly stay home and watch our children (Matthew 12, Sarah 14) and their friends grow older. We like to do as much as we can with them as time is fleeting.

Why I signed up for the MDP:
How cool is it to be part of a beta test group on a toy you like? LEGO is well designed and is nice to work with. It feels good in your hands. This is a great opportunity for our family and we are certainly learning and having fun so far. I know lots of parents who have a hard time buying gifts for their pre-teenage children and I was curious about the LMS advancements and what kind of a fit it would be for the 10-15 age group. Being part of this group of testers, I now know there are many, many people much older than 15 using LMS!

Experience with MINDSTORMS:
We've gone from Duplo to Technics to the Droid Developer Kit, and back again. Matthew (12) thinks that if everyone had worked with Technic, they'd all be more comfortable with studless construction.

NXT Project: Snackbot

About this NXT Project:
Our dog has her dry food mixed with water so by adding two cups to our LEGO Mindstorms kit we came up with SnackBot. The robot drives over to the dog dish and when it gets within 20 cm using its Ultrasonic Sensor, it slows down, approaches the dish at a slower speed, stops and dumps the food and water in. The robot hold the cups upside down for 2 seconds giving them a chance to drain, then lifts the cups back up to their original position, backs away and whistles, which is the signal for the dog to come and eat. Our dog loved the test stage of this project!

Future prototypes might combine a phone call and Bluetooth
to feed the dog when you were out of the house. This has certainly been fun for the two legged and four legged members of our family.

Watch the Snackbot Movie

NXT Project: GolfBot

About this NXT Project:
Here is a third project we have worked on: GolfBot

A pendulum golf club shaped arm hits a ball (included in the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT kit).

NXT Project: Catapult Bot

About this NXT Project:
Another project we have worked on include a Catapult Bot

This bot throws little lego pieces when it comes within 10cm of an object.

Watch the CatapultBotMovie