Total Recall - Day 6

This day proved to be a little frustrating but progress was made on the design. Discussions of strategy have moved into designs but most of the designs still prove to be incomplete.  Many of the small groups have focused on one or two features of the robot rather than the whole robot.  Groups began to make prototypes of pieces with cardstock, tape and staples.  Several groups had to be refocused on a number of occasions due to getting off task.  Most of these behaviors were just seemingly random conversations that led away from the task at hand.  Some groups chose to utilize materials in the shop to do some testing to see how the game pieces acted in certain situations while others just made assumptions on how the pieces would interact with the robot.  A few students applied some basic physics to make some calculations to assist in designing and evaluating their design.  

Team structure was discussed between David and several of the mentors.  He has continued to try and place individuals in sub team leadership roles.  The structure is coming together.  He also moved from group to group to ask questions about their designs and to help keep them focused on the process of designing.   

Jonny worked with Scott on the RobotC installation. Sometimes this proves difficulty due to the school computer have DeepFreeze on them.  This software resets the image of the computer each time it is turned off to an original state.  The software must be turned off so we can install software and sometimes it interferes with how the software interacts with the programming interface.  Scott worked with Jonny on the controls and interface as well as the software on the computer.

In the presentations from the small design groups, many teams focused on one of two aspects of the game.  Both of those aspects proved to be third or fourth in priority for our scoring strategy.  Team discussion at the end of the evening revolved around what was done for priority one and two.  If we could not do priority one, we could not score a single point in the contest.  If priority two could not be accomplished, the scoring strategy becomes much less effective by making the jobs of all three workers in the system much more difficult and task oriented.   

The team will not work on Friday, although the robotics II students will meet in class.  Discussion in class will revolve around Saturday's activities and the evaluation of Thursday nights progress and setbacks.  

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