Strategy and Progress Towards the Championship!

Today was our first meeting between the qualifying tournament and the State Championship tournament. First, we set some goals for what we want to do before the championship.  We plan to make a Core Values introduction script for that judging session, and our new goal for the robot game is to score 300 or more points.  We scored 238 at our qualifying tournament.


We assigned "facilitators" to each task to improve communication and teamwork, and to transfer more responsibility to the team members for making progress.

Core Values Introduction
Emmett and Damek came up with a basic outline for the introduction, and the rest of the team will write their lines as homework this week. 

Robot Game
Luke and Kenny and Eden worked on the robot today.  Working together, they got the man by the house captured and brought to base.  When he is delivered to the red zone, we get 66 more points, which puts us over 300!  We are now thinking about doing another mission as well.  For homework this week everyone is thinking about which missions we should consider trying to solve next.

Qualifying Tournament

                                                 2013 - 2014 Qualifying Tournament

by Kenny (team member)    

Parade

                                  We had a good time marching in the parade with our silly hats!

                                                                   Robot Game

On the first round our robot went haywire but we still scored good.
At the beginning of the second round some wires weren't all the way in and the robot had some problems but it was our best round.


 


                                                                            The end

At the announcing of the teams who would be going to state we found out that we would go to state.  We are so happy that we are going to state.

Posters, Robot & a Mission

At wednesday's meeting we broke up into groups of 2 and 3.  One group, which consisted of Emmett, Eden & myself (Damek) worked on our core values and project posters

and the other group, which consisted of Kenny & Luke, worked on getting the robot to drive straight.

Halfway through the meeting Eden and Luke decided to switch groups, and Kenny & Eden worked on the pets mission part of the robot game

while Emmett, Luke & I continued to make progress on the posters.

When Straight Isn't Straight

Today we were working on the ambulance mission, which is just a long, straight path out and back to base.  We discovered that the big problem was that our robot was pulling to the right even though we were telling it to drive straight.

We tried switching the wheels around, and using another "identical" tire, but it still pulled right.  We decided that the motors must be the source of the problem, but we only have two EV3 motors, so we have to make them work.

Using the move-steering block, we started telling it to turn very slightly left instead of going straight.  We still had trouble getting it to go straight - it was still pulling right.  Then we realized that the battery power was very low, so we stopped working to charge the robot.  In competition, our robot will be fully charged, so we want to do these tests under the same conditions.

When it's charged again, we'll try to find turn values that make it go straight with the move-steering block.  We may also try the move-tank block with slightly different motor powers for the two motors.

Meeting Bruce Tremper of the Utah Avalanche Center

The past couple weeks we've been trying to get our project finished up.  Today we finished the posters we'll hold during our project presentation and then went to the Natural History Museum where Bruce Tremper was giving an avalanche talk. 

 

There were a lot of people there to listen to him talk about avalanches!

 

  

After the presentation was over, we stayed to tell him about our project idea and he said it was a great idea!  It was nice to talk to an expert and get such nice feedback.

we did a core values challange this week, ware we got a number whispered in our ear and we had to put ourselves in order (1,2,3,4,5) with out talking or seeing. we also worked on the robot we put on a light sensor in between the motors to save spase and to shade the light sensor so readings would be more or less the same.

we also wrote some of our script for the skit that we are going to preform for the judges.

Now featuring motorized attachments!

We started our meeting with a Core Values exercise.  The team stood in a single file line with hands on the shoulders of the person in front off them, and the leader was blindfolded.  The challenge was to navigate around the house.  We decided that the second person in line would be the driver and give commands to the leader.  We had fun with this one.  Interestingly, it got harder for the leader as time went on because we all got comfortable and were chatting so it was hard for the leader to hear the driver.

The team relaxes during a break.  Kenny is well camouflaged in the tree!

 This week we continued working on our project script.  We are almost done with the outline.  We've written a nice elevator pitch and the beginning and ending of the skit.

Luke sends the robot out for the cargo plane mission.

Last year, our robot didn't use any motorized attachments.  One of our big goals this year was to use motorized attachments for some missions.  At this meeting, we finally got a third motor attached to the robot, and we successfully used it to trigger the cargo plane and the tsunami missions!  Everyone is getting better at programming the EV3, too.