The Club was very pleased (and grateful!) to have received a new EV3 robot last week, donated by the Center for Integrative Studies in the General Sciences @ Michigan State University.

We were eager to try it out, but of course we wanted to build something REALLY cool. So, we decided to take on the elephant bot:

It took us three hours to put together–it started out so small:

The trunk mechanism is pretty cool:

…and here it is with the frame of the head attached:

It looked a little weird without a head:

But we finally finished and downloaded the software.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

Coach Christina found a problem in the construction (all the way back at step 57 of 251… sigh…). It was painful to tear it back that far, but at least the some of the pieces could be kept together, like the legs and head.

Finally, Coach Todd found ANOTHER problem with the construction (I swear, we followed the directions closely!), and then we were finally good to go. Our elephant, named Ellie, can roar, walk backwards and forwards, and pick up her “toy”.

We’ll be excited to use this beautiful robot for competition next season, although we’ll sadly have to disassemble Ellie to compete.