This article was published in the Lenoir News-Topic.

In a classroom-style building tucked into the corner of one of the old Shuford Mills buildings, all chipping paint on brick walls, 10 sixth-graders from Granite Falls Middle School wearing safety glasses put parts and pieces together, making robots.

The students spent their half-day on Friday making what they called eggbots — basically, robots capable of drawing on spherical surfaces the size of eggs — at Foothills Community Workshop. In this case, the spherical surface used was ping-pong ball.

Each eggbot can be connected to a computer and is driven by two motors — one that turns the ball (or egg) back and forth, and one that moves an attached pen across the ball’s surface. The machines can take any design made in a drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator — or Inkscape, an open-source version that the Foothills Community Workshop folks like to use — and recreate it on the surface of a spherical object. Continue reading →

This article was published in the Lenoir News-Topic.

A 10-year-old boy crafts bird feeders out of peanut butter, birdseed and bagels. A cancer survivor plans a yearly golf tournament. A teacher creates handmade coasters.

And it’s all done with one thing in mind: a cure for cancer.

In Caldwell County and elsewhere, most people experience one night of Relay for Life, the American Cancer Society’s primary fundraiser. But that night of walking and camping out around a track is the culmination of months of fundraising.

“We Relay all year,” volunteer Christina McLean said. “We’re thinking and trying to do something all year long.” Continue reading →