We have completed two weeks of the build season at this point. We have made progress with the team structure and students working under student leadership. The groups seem to be working but need redirection from time to time.
Student leadership and decision making has been an aspect we have not had the past few years. We had a few students who were willing to take on leadership roles as well as lead a small group in some decision making. The mentors have all agreed we feel it is very important to have more student leadership and decision making on the team. At times, the team works very within these confines but we still seem to be figuring out how to make it work as well as staying within that system. Many times, students have approached one of the mentors to ask a question about a team decision only to be told, find the student lead who is responsible for that and visit with them.
On Saturday, we had students working on the following groups: shop/robot, programming, CAD, website, media, video, BEST award, photography, outreach and the FTC team. Lots of students working in the shop, three different groups in the classroom and three groups in the hallway.
Joyce Witowski visited with several of the group leaders on Saturday about project management and communications. Joyce arranged for us to get Basecamp for the team to manage projects this year. Basecamp is the leading web-based project management and collaboration tool. David has sent out invitations to team members to set up accounts. He will do a presentation for the team on Monday night about how Basecamp works and how it will be implemented on the team.
The team has continued to struggle with what are the final dimensions and decisions on the robot. On Saturday, time was spent on aspects that were discussed but never finalized. This created a situation where we had to take time out of the day to discuss and make the decisions so that all the robot team was on the same page. We have two different groups who are working front wheel designs for the robot. One of the design is a omniwheel, while the other design is a remodel of our golf ball caster mounted on the lazy susan. Tim Ousley came by on Saturday to see the progress of the team. He worked with a few kids on using the mill. He also took some scrap lexan home to experiment with his CNC. We are planning on a few of the students going to his house to help mill the parts for the omni wheels. Rear wheel size was determined to be 10" for the robot. Wheel hubs are done, wheels are done with rubber tread, now we need the motor mounts completed so we can get the robot platform running around.
Jonny and the programming team have prototyped code for all the aspects of the robot. They are awaiting the completion of the chassis for deployment and execution of the code.
The media team worked on several different aspects on Saturday. Austin and his group worked on ideas and storyboards for the Youtube Video submission while the website team worked on web structure, content creation and programming options.
The BEST award team looked over winning notebooks from last year. They focused on aspects that were present in all the notebooks as well as features that stood out in each notebook. The discussion also revolved around possible themes for the display. The display has discussed having a mechanical/robotic portion of the display this year.
Mark Dutton came to visit with the team on Saturday. He is attending Texas A&M. It was good to see him in the shop visiting with the team. He just came in and went to work with the team just like he had been involved with the team from the first day of school this year. We visited about his classes and looked at two of his books from his classes. His design workbook has lessons very similar to what we are working with the robotics I students currently. Mark mentioned it was very apparent to him the students in his classes who have had the opportunity to work on teams or projects prior to enrolling at Texas A&M.
On a side note, after discussions with the CATE Department Head, Pat Betzner, we will have more funding available for the team from the Carl Perkins Grant. This news allows us to reevaluate the regionals we will attend in the Spring for FIRST. Team leaders have decided we will attempt to attend two regionals this year: San Antonio and Dallas. San Antonio is a first week regional and a Bag and Tag event as well. This means we will bring our robot to San Antonio with us rather than have it shipped. We will ship it to Dallas which is a week four event.
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