Sistories is a brand new podcast about travel hosted by two sisters–Maryam and Nour! https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Sistories-1.m4a Welcome to our new podcast, Sistories! My sister and I love to travel, and we want to inspire you to travel too. My name is Nour, and I’m one of your hosts, along with my sister Maryam. I am ten years old, and I love to travel. My family has been to many places near and far. We have a mini Goldendoodle named Lulu who sometimes gets to go with us on trips. My name is Maryam the Magnificent. I am eight and a half. I love to travel, and I also like sports like swimming and soccer. One of my favorite spots to travel is Grenada. I was born in Houston, but my family was from Grenada and Egypt. I have lots of family there. Today’s topic is why you should travel. Why? My sister and I will both talk about some reason we love to travel. Nour is up first! Here are my two top reasons to try out traveling. Reason 1: you should travel a lot so you can see the lifestyles of locals and notice how they may do things differently than we do in the United States. One year my family visited St. Maarten, a beautiful island in the Caribbean. When you’re driving there the sides of the road that you drive on can change. Why? Because one side of the island is Dutch and the other side is French. You have to drive on the opposite side of the road depending on which part of the island you’re on. Another year, my family traveled to Grenada where my dad is from. We went to a restaurant that was right on the beach. When the server came she told us if you’re hungry in Grenada, you shouldn’t come to a restaurant. It took a really long time for our food to arrive because all of the ingredients are fresh and prepared right then. Reason 2: You can explore new places and try new things. Like when we went to Mexico City and walked to the city square. We saw smoke and wondered what it was. My dad’s uncle explained to us that they were using incense to cleanse you. The incense is supposed to make you feel better. My dad’s uncle said it made him feel like he could fly. We ended up trying it, and it was great! Another place our family went was Egypt. When we were there we got to snorkel in the Red Sea, which is very clear. As I was watching my dad scuba dive, I jumped off the dock; I could see my dad below me with all the beautiful fish. We also got to visit the pyramids on horses and camels. It was a bumpy ride, but I recommend you try it. Now it’s my turn. I have 2 more amazing reasons you should travel. Reason 1: you should travel so that you can be amazed. One time my family and I were in Boston. We went on a boat ride with my cousin. It was a big boat. We were going whale watching. When we were far from land, we saw a whale wagging its tail in the ocean and slapping the water. It was giving itself a high five! Then we saw 4 whales swimming together, and they blew out water. Next, a gigantic whale jumped out of the water and twirled in the air. It was pretty and cool because the water droplets were surrounding it. I wanted to see it again, but it was time to go back. Reason 2: You should travel to take a break from your stressful life! Kids who have to deal with school, activities, homework, impatient and annoying friends, and your chores. When you travel you can go to places like Grenada and put all of it behind you. Grenada is my favorite place because it has a magical beach that can change your life. And you can also pick off mango from the trees, and you can walk on the beach all around. It’s just one of my favorite places. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast, Sistories! Come back again to listen to our new podcast topic: how to pack for an awesome trip. Have a great trip!
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ROBOMIND Ep. 2: Speechless
https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Speechless-ROBOMIND-Episode-2.m4a Podcast #2: “Speechless” Transcript: Hello, my name is Misha Ahmed, and I am your host of this podcast series called ROBOMIND. I know for those of you who weren’t here last episode you may be wondering, what does ROBOMIND mean? ROBOMIND is a combination of two things: robotics and mind. I love robotics, and I believe that it shapes how you think, and it shapes your mind. That is why I called my podcast ROBOMIND. Now, a little about me. I’m 12 now–yes, I had a birthday since the last podcast–and I am a robotics fanatic! I am on my middle school robotics team, and I want to inspire you to give robotics a shot. The name of Episode #2 is….drumroll please…”Speechless.” As you can see, I’m continuing with the Disney theme with the name of a song–one of my favorites from Aladdin. And now I want to talk about the new VEX IQ game, Full Volume, which although I’m going to be talking about it a lot, has got me speechless! But before we get started with today’s topic, I’m going to provide you with the answer to the riddle from Podcast One: Those girl bosses that we heard about last time, who were crushing it on the battlefield, they were queens on a chess board! Now that we got that done with let’s get to the juicy stuff: the game called VEX IQ Full Volume. I first heard about this game on the last day of Worlds when I was there with my elementary school team. The announcement was epic! The new game field was brought down from the roof of the convention center, and everybody was screaming like crazy in anticipation. As soon as the new video came on, it was silent. Everyone wanted to hear the description of the new game. Today, I will give you my easy and short explanation. But, first up, an analogy. Imagine you’re packing for a trip. There are three bags, and there are multiple different clothes you need to pack. Half of them are in your closet and you know where they are; the rest are in the black hole known as laundry. What does all this have to do with the game Full Volume? The person packing = the robot my team and I built. The 3 suitcases = the 3 goal zones on the field. The clothes = the 3 types of blocks on the field. The laundry = the supply zone because in the laundry you never know where things are and in the supply zone everything’s random. All the blocks are in different places. I don’t want to bore you with ALL the nitty gritty stuff, so I will go through the main points of this game. If you want to know more you can read the VEX IQ Full Volume game manual or watch the YouTube video for Full Volume. But let me just tell you what you need to know! You need to know about how to score and how to get the different bonuses. You need to know about skills challenges So, how to score. Your end goal is to score as many points as possible by using your robot to score cubes in the goal and receive as many different bonuses as possible. First, you get one point for each block scored in any goal. You can also get 5 points from knocking down red blocks off their pegs. You have a partner team–also known as your alliance–if you guys enter the supply zone, you guys will receive 20 extra points. If all blocks scored in a single goal are the same type, that goal earns a uniform bonus of 10 points. (Bonus!) You and your team can also receive a height bonus based on the highest fill level shared by all three goals. Bonus time! There are three fill levels: low, medium, and high, worth 10, 20, and 30 points. At the end of the match, robots can try to park in the supply zone. 5 points for each partially parked robot, 10 for each fully parked robot, and don’t worry I know some of you guys are like, “Do you need I license for this?” No, you just need a nice, good brain, which I’m sure all of you guys have. And a 10 point bonus for double parking. Now, I know you want to know about those skills. Every year there’s the driving and autonomous skills. Driving is when you and your team get 1 minute to drive. Then there’s the autonomous coding, which is no drivers, no remote, just code. At the end these scores will be combined to determine a Robot Skills Challenge Champion. You need to know that even if your first competition goes terrible, don’t give up. Just improve overall, and next competition you will crush it! That’s it for today. Keep your gears turning and keep your mind in shape. It is time for the new riddle! You will need a piece of paper and a PENCIL to jot down a series of letters. EPISODE 2 RIDDLE: I observed some initial letters from a sequence I see in this book. All you must do is tell me this: which letter should come next? The sequence is FSTFFSS. So tell me what is next! I’ll give you the answer next time. Thank you to all of you amazing people who added comments last time. Thank you so much! This is your host Misha Ahmed of ROBOMIND signing off!
ROBOMIND Ep. 1: I’ll Make an Engineer Out of You By Misha Ahmed, 11
ROBOMIND is a new podcast dedicated to robotics. Listen to the first episode here! https://stonesoup.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Ill_Make_an_Engineer_Out_of_You-1.m4a Transcript: Hello, my name is Misha Ahmed, and I am your host of this podcast series called ROBOMIND. I know you may be wondering, what does ROBOMIND mean? ROBOMIND is combination of two things: robotics and mind. I love robotics, and I believe that it shapes how you think and it shapes your mind. That is why I called my podcast ROBOMIND. Now a little bit about me! My name is Misha, and I’m 11 years old. I love robotics and my nickname is Mushu, which brings me to our episodes name. I know you may be wondering, “I’ll Make an Engineer Out of You” that’s the weirdest thing ever! No, it’s not. It’s a perfect name. You want to know why? Because my nickname’s Mushu like the dragon from Mulan, and we’re both very similar, both loud, both talkative, both really fun people. Well, he’s not a person, but it’s okay. And I just wanted to inspire you to maybe do robotics someday in the future or just learn a little bit more about it. And today I’m going to tell you a story that happened to me during my first ever robotics competition. New things can be really scary, and this one was one of them. I was literally terrified because I was one of the drivers and I didn’t know if maybe I was gonna be the one to mess up my team and I didn’t want that. But as the games went on, our robot only worked once, and I knew that wasn’t enough to get an award. And I know you may be wondering, why are these awards important? Well, these awards can qualify you to go to the next round, which is the state competition, and everybody wants to go to state competition. And so did my team. We really did! Since this wasn’t a good competition for us, we knew that the only chance of an award that would qualify us was the design award. The design award is a combination of your notebook and your interview. Your notebook is your documentation of your process of building your robots, and your interview is basically when one judge or two comes up to you and asks you questions about your team and about your robot. It’s important that in the interview everybody talks because if not everybody talks, it won’t seem like you worked together as a group. And it’s really important that you look like you worked together because they may not know, but you do work together a lot. And so we really hoped that we would get the design award, but we knew there were so many other great great teams! I’m telling you, we got more and more nervous as they started giving out more and more awards, and we saw so many so many, and I’m telling you a lot of amazing teams! And that’s when they started to announce the winner of the design award, and they said 97793A, and that was my team name. And I’m telling you, I was jumping for joy! It was absolutely crazy. I’m telling you if you looked at my face for the first five seconds, I wasn’t even moving. I wasn’t blinking because I couldn’t even understand that this was real. This was actually happening to me. And then I ran up with my team and accepted our award. Then we got to go to the state competition, which was just an amazing experience, which led us to our next. And there we won another award, which led us to the world competition, and that was such a great experience. It was so amazing to be there, and it all started at this one competition. It all happened at this one competition. And I think that it’s so crazy because in robotics, there’s a lot of downs, right? But these ups that happen, they make the whole thing worthwhile. And that is why I love robotics, and that’s what robotics has taught me. And I wanted to end with a riddle because it keeps your gears turning and keeps your mind in shape. So I’m gonna say that riddle twice, and I’m gonna say it slow one. You want to know why? Because you might need to write it down. It’s a hard riddle. Even I didn’t understand it at first! EPISODE 1 RIDDLE: There are 30 men and two women dressed in uniforms of black or white. They’re locked in combat for many hours. The women may be few, but they hold the most power of all of those on the battlefield. Who are these warriors? And at the beginning of the next episode, I’ll tell you the answer to the riddle. If you got it hooray for you, and if you didn’t get it, we’re on the same step. It took me a while, and maybe you couldn’t get it right away. That is okay! I’ll give you a new riddle next episode, and I’ll tell you the answer to the old one. This is Misha Ahmed your host of ROBOMIND signing off!
