To Leanne, Megan, Dana, Rochelle, and Ms. Liebrecht:

DUDE looks a lot like the robot that my coworkers and I made. Are you
sure that you didn't sneak a peak out our robot before you made yours? If
you did, then you did a good job of something that we scientists do all
the time: building off of other people's work. If you tried to bake a
chocolate cake, but first had to invent a recipe for cake, you would never
finish in time. But, if you use someone else's recipe for vanilla cake and
adapt it for chocolate, you would be done much faster.

I like that you made a neat drawing and that you labeled it. That makes it
very easy for me to understand what you are doing. I also like that you
compared the robot to a basketball. Making comparisons to easy things is a
great way of explaining difficult things.

Your robots solves many of the astronaut's problems. I have a few
questions about how it might work. How does the astronaut tell it what to
do? If all of the thrusters point out, could the robot turn? What would
the robot take pictures of? If the robot uses motion sensors to tell if it
is going to hit things, then would it hit things that are standing still?

-- Salvatore Domenick Desiano
Research Scientist
smile.