Tomorrow is the big day!

The team is just one practice away from the tournament and major strides were made today.  The team worked on their skit some more and a bunch of hands worked together at making the team poster.  Great team work!  The team also had major repeatable successes with their robot missions and they were scoring the highest they have all season.  Go RoboRangers!  The team also got some administrative work in and made checklists of all the items that need to be brought to the competition. 

The RoboRangers are coming down to the wire.  The qualifiers are this Saturday!  The team has just 2 more meetings to prepare.  Yesterday, the team worked on performing their skit.  It’s quite entertaining.  Tomorrow the research/project team will be working hard on the team’s poster and making checklists of everything they need to bring with them to the competition.  The robot mechanics and programmers still have quite a bit of work ahead of them.  They were having repeatability issues so, as a team, they have completely changed their objectives.  It’s a difficult task to change strategies this late in the game, but they are working as hard as they can.  And that is all they can do.  They are having a good time doing it, and in the end, that is all that matters! 

Thank you to the Concepcions for the gigantic pizza that barely fit through the front door!

I’ve been remiss at updating our team’s blog.  The team is just 2 weeks away from their qualifying competition.  The programmers and robot designers have been hard at work.  After a complete rebuild of their robot, the team has a good handle on some of the missions.  It’s exciting to see how excited the kids get when they execute their program flawlessly.  Cheers abound!  The researchers have been busy gathering all the information for their project and will be finalizing their skit tomorrow.

At one of our team meetings, the kids were fortunate to have Brandon Hamilton as a guest speaker and give the kids a peek into his world of orthopedics.  He brought along plastic models of the hand and foot, along with a titanium external fixator,  He showed a ton of xrays and some pictures of actual surgeries which garnered a few “ewwwws” and “that’s gross!” from the kids.  The kids came away with a lot of great information that they have applied to their research project.

Here is the RoboRanger tshirt design, artwork by Alex.  The shirts will arrive just in time for the tournament!

The past 2 weeks meetings have been focused on getting 1-2 mission challenges complete.  The team decided together that achieving the Patent/Claw mission was high priority as only one team can score the points from it in the head-to-head match.  The programmers and robot designers worked to get the robot to it, following the objectives of the strategic designers.  

 And this is what happens after 3 hours of intense programming…

Big thank yous for the Simmons, Shurtz, and Zapalac families for the dinners you have provided the team!

Last weeks meeting was a productive one.  First the team headed over to the field table. Coach Damian spent quite a bit of time going over each mission and the points associated with each one. The team was already strategizing about which ones they wanted to tackle first and which ones, given the low point amount, were not worth trying. They may adjust their strategy as they go along but it was great to see all the ideas already.

Next item on the agenda was choosing the research topic. The team members had the chance to present their research ideas to the group. There were some really great ideas and a lot of effort put into them. The team ultimately voted on an idea presented by McKay. His idea is to create a pill that would make bones so strong that they will never break and skin so strong, it will never bleed. INVINCIBLE! A lot of research lies ahead but I think they are starting with a pretty neat subject.

Next it was time to vote for the teams t-shirt design. Again, there were some great designs and the team had a tough choice. But in the end, Alex had the winning design. Once I get it scanned in, I will post it here. Great job Alex!

The team building challenge for this week was a fun one.  Each team was given 25 straws, 3 feet of tape, scissors, and an egg.  The objective was to build a protective housing for the egg, which was to be dropped from a height of 8 feet, after the 8 minute construction time period.  Each team had a similar design and after all the testing and dropping, every egg broke.  They might not have protected the egg, but they sure had fun watching the eggs smash on the concrete!!