Teens Step Up To Rebuild Precious Moments Robots ▶▶▶ Recently, a robotics team at Thomas Jefferson Independent Day School took on the task of getting some of the original Precious Moments robotic characters rebuilt and programmed for the Precious Moments Chapel Visitor Center. Three things you don’t often hear in the same sentence might be: robotics, teenage boys, and Precious Moments. Recently, a robotics team at a local school in Joplin, MO took on a special challenge. This group of students was up to the task of getting some of the original Precious Moments robotic characters rebuilt and programmed for the Precious Moments Chapel Visitor Center.
One of Sam Butcher’s grandsons, 15-year-old Cain, got the ball rolling. Cain often volunteers at the Chapel, and while he was cleaning last summer, he noticed some of the robotics weren’t working. He took it upon himself to reach out to the head of his school’s Robotics Program, Robert Carlson. Mr. Carlson called on a team of three students to tackle the project. Under Mr. Carlson’s guidance, the team disassembled one of the robots, reprogrammed it, and rebuilt it to perfect working condition. This was highly impressive as some of these robots are more than 25 years old! They even utilized the mechanisms of the Precious Moments robot, placed it in a new outer costume (a musical monkey), and tested it in the school musical. The students started working on the mechanical aspects, including replacing the motors and servos with modern versions and adjusting the range of motion. They had a working skeleton for a bear character and tested its motion and programming during the high school musical “Phantom of the Opera”. For the test, students in an art class made a monkey costume and music box mount for the robot, and the robotics students helped the musical cast and crew integrate it into the sets. Once they saw how it worked during dozens of rehearsals and two live performances of the musical, they made adjustments to the program and the movements and exchanged the monkey suit for the original bear costume.
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Three students from Mr. Carlson’s Applied Programming and Robotics class worked on rebuilding Precious Moments robot characters for the Visitor Center. Students are (above, from left) Drew, Shayaan, and Abhijith.
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SPRING/SUMMER 2020
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