Connecting with comments

You can post comments on the Comments section of our blog. As we have not had any comments other than from the Legolettes themselves, we hope that people from all over the United States will comment, especially cancer therapists!

Hopefully,
Grace

This blog

This blog isn't just about our competition, it's also about researching, and helping, dogs and humans with cancer. This is a very significant topic for my friends and I. We have been searching at least millions of problems having to do with senior citizens, and have finnaly found one!

Cancer connections

For some info about cancer, click the following words that are highlighted in blue.

For some natural solutions to human cancer, click here


For some facts about cancer in dogs, click here.

We are happy that you are using this site for your connections. Feel free to comment on this post if you like it.

More about the LEGOlettes

Welcome to cancer expert connections. We are a secondary resource for cancer in animals and cancer in humans. As said in many other posts, we are a fourth-grade FLL(FIRST LEGO league)team. We are hoping to make this generation ready for cancer with our solution that you have just visited. Our solution is this blog.
                       Thank you again,
                         Anastasia

Editing

Many of our posts have been changed due to editing. Don't worry;we meant to do this. We hope you enjoy our new changes, and visit  our blog again. Thank you so much for visiting cancer expert connections. And also, wish us luck with our blog and competition.
-Anastasia

Back at ya!

Hello, this is Anastasia. I am the LEGOlettes programming champion (meaning I program a lot of the missions, and the other girls go to me when they have quesions about programming). Today we have been editing all posts made by the LEGOlettes on this blog. Many posts have been changed to suit our needs for this blog, which will help us keep our spirits up for the competition!

Robot Competition+ Lily

Hello! Just so you know, we are the LEGOlettes, and in our competition, the two main projects are the song and skit, and the robot mat competition. I have been working on the skit and song with a few other girls. The robot mat competition is when our robot, Lily, has to be programmed by the computer to move around and complete a mission. This will probably be something fun to watch, because the robot does it all herself ,and we can't touch her until she is in our base. I can't wait until the competition! It's my first one, but I'm not exactly nervous, just a little curious about what will happen. By the way, we all have little things that we are good at, and mine was Robot Design Champion. My job was to design Lily so that she could pick things up, move them around, and much more. I hope you'll learn some of the obstacles and activities that my group and I had to overcome, and I hope I inspired you to try something or dare to do it... maybe I even inspired you to start your own Lego Robotics Group!
- Maddie

Competition

On December 15th, our LEGOlettes team will be competing in a competition.  At the competition, we will be placed next to a mat and compete against other LEGO teams with our robot, Lily. Lily will do as many missions as possible, but we only have 2 minutes, and we can't do them all. We will also be doing a short skit and a song based on the Beatles song 'Help.' We will also be given a teamwork problem, such as looking at string wadded up and trying to decide if it's one piece or two without touching it. This will help determine our teamwork ability. We might also be showing a mission to the judges.  This competition is our first one, so we hope it's very exciting and fun! Some of the girls heve never been to a FLL competition, and we're hoping we go to many more besides this.
Katie + Madison

Some General Facts About Cancer

 Some General Facts About Cancer

 Cancer in dogs can happen very frequently. We need to be more prepared to the signs of cancer so that our dogs can live longer.

50% of dogs over age ten get cancer, and the warning signs include:

• a lump or a bump
• a wound that doesn't heal
• enlarged lymph nodes
• a swelling in a bone
• abnormal bleeding    

...and many others.  If you own a golden retriever, a boxer, a flat-coated retriever, or a Bernese mountain dog, then watch out; these types of dogs are especially prone to cancer. Dog owners with other breeds of dogs should still be vigilant, because your dog can still get cancer.We have noticed that oddly enough, dogs get the same types of cancer that humans do, even though they don't have many of the same genes that we have. We have also noticed that the most common breeds of dogs get cancer more often than other dogs. Therapists have discovered some reasons why dogs and humans might get the same types of cancer, which includes ideas such as the fact that they drink the same water that we do and that they live in the same environment. There are many types of cancer that mammals can get, such as malignant lymphoma, which affects the lymphatic system; mast cell tumors; mammary gland tumors; bone cancer; and many others. We should be watching for cancer. It can hurt us in many ways.

Programming

Today I am going to tell you about programming the robot. The robot is programmed using a computer with a certain program meant for the FLL (First LEGO League) competition. We then use a toolbar on the side to add in different movements that include forward, backward, turn, wait,loop, and many more. Using those movements, we create a chain of actions so that the robot can complete the challenges, called missions, set out for it. We have the robot test the program on the FLL mat, and then we make changes to it to make it work (if it doesn't already work). In the end we will hopefully have a program that works.

-Anastasia

Robot game by Anastasia

The two main parts of the compitition are the robot game, and the project. Today I am going to tell you about the robot game, for the robot game we have to decide a couple missions to program that we think we can accomplish. Our three main priorities are the woodworking mission, the quilt mission, and the bridge mission. We have had troubles with each mission, but do our best. At the compitition we will have a tablecloth-like mat that was made for this years compitition on a table (that the mat is sized for). Our table with the mat will be next to another one. On the other table there will be a team (other than us) competing against us. We try to do as many missions as we can with our robot (Lily), each mission  gives us a certain amount of points. We try to get as many points as we can.

Project by Anastasia

Today I am going to tell you about our idea for the project part of the FLL competition. For our project, we are going to rewrite the lyrics of 'Help' by the Beatles. Our project is going to be about cancer in humans and animals. Along with 'Help,' we are going to do a short skit about a senior figuring out they have lymphoma (a type of cancer) and a owner figuring out their dog has lymphoma. This hopefully helped you learn more about our project!

-Anastasia

Lily

Hello, this is Anastasia. I am going to quickly (and briefly) tell you about Lily, our robot. She has been programmed to do many missions on this year's FLL robot run mat. The mat is like a tablecloth that is decorated with boxes where you Velcro on LEGO creations. Lily has 3 motors: 1 as an arm, and 2 as legs. We each take turns programming and testing Lily.

-Anastasia 

What dogs and humans with cancer have in common

This post, sadly, is my last post on this series of information.  On my two earlier posts, I talked about our trip to the veterinarian, Dr. Dodd, and our talk with Miss Lisa Slama, a human cancer expert.  An interesting thing that dogs with cancer and humans with cancer is that they both can get lymphoma.  Something that they don't  have in common is that there isn't a particular age that a dog gets cancer. There isn't a particular age for humans either, but there is an hypothesis that when you get to certain stages in your life, you get cancer.  Something I find very interesting is that dogs get treated with chemo therapy too, not just humans (chemo therapy is a cancer treatment that makes all your hair fall out, for humans at least).But the interesting part is that in chemo therapy for dogs, they don't lose their hair because they have a different hair growth cycle than humans.  Also, some human cancer treatments have cured dogs with cancer, and some dog cancer treatments have cured humans with cancer.  The Legolettes think that dog cancer experts and human cancer experts need to get together and find a cure that will cure humans and dogs with cancer.

-Katie

Our talk with Miss Lisa

We had a talk with a human cancer expert named Miss Lisa Slama, and talked about what types of cancer humans get. When we talked with the vet, she told us that dogs get lymphoma, and Miss Lisa said that humans get lymphoma too.  Miss Lisa said that the risks of getting cancer at those ages are different in each category of senior citizens, young people, and middle-aged citizens. Senior citizens can get cancer from old age, too, and sometimes they get it when they're younger, but it was just never cured.  If you haven't read my first post about our trip to the vet, then read it please, and then read this, and then read my final post in this series about what dogs with cancer and humans with cancer have in common.

-Katie

Our trip to the vet

We took a trip to the veterinary clinic and talked to a vet.At the vet, we learned that cancer in dogs is usually in the more popular dogs, like golden retrievers, german shepherds, flat-coated retrievers,etcetera.  Lymphoma is a very common cancer in dogs. When the doctors test the dogs, they use the same kind of things they use to test humans with cancer, like the ultrasound scanner and x-rays.  Dogs and humans have many similarities when it comes to cancer.  Read my next post and see what we have learned about cancer in humans.

-Katie

More about cancer

Click the link below to learn more about human cancer. Dogs, cats, and other animals get cancer too, and sad stories link side-by-side to animals and cancer. We hope you are inspired by this, and look at some other sites about cancer and communication with other therapists!


wikipedia

New Addition to our Blog: Poll!

Hey!

I'm Katie, I just saw our blog, isn't it amazing?!?  We just added a new poll on our blog! Try it out and you can vote on how helpful you think our blog is!  Feel free to ask questions or comment on our blog at our comment section that we posted.

-Katie

About this site

This site is for anybody, but we are mainly targeting cancer experts for animals and people. We hope that they then can collaborate in ways that they have not before. We created this blog as part of a project for the FIRST LEGO League's (FLL) 2012 subject, which was Senior Solutions. Using various bits of data, we determined that about 2,550 people die of cancer, out of the 100,000 people that die per year. We hope to reduce that number by allowing human and animal scientists to work alongside each other to find solutions.

-The LEGOlettes

Commenting

You can comment on this post to share your work with the other type of specialist.
-Anastasia

How to use this site

The purpose of this site is to have Animal cancer experts share what they have learned (solutions, problems, etc.) with Human cancer experts, (or vice versa). To share your work with the other type of cancer specialist,comment on the post called "open this if you are a therapist" and share what you wanted to say.

-Anastasia