Today we met to work on our presentation board. We decided it was good thing for us to have to allow other people to quickly learn more about us in a fun and straightforward way. This way we will have a visual way to communicate information to judges and others that are interested om learning more about us. We all worked on writing our own bios, and working together, and although we had differing opinions, we decided to do what we thought was best for the team. We also went on twitter and did some outreach, which helped us to gain more followers. We were shocked by how nice everyone was, and also how incredible it was to meet new teams from all over the world.
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Today, Rachel, Izzie, Isabella, and Ava met to work on our presentation at Lake Harriet Lower Campus.
We started off by brainstorming what we could do with the class of 20-28 kids. We all agreed that we wanted to talk to them about core values, and team work. After saying any ideas that popped into our heads, we finally came up with a idea! We decided to make an interactive activity, that relates to the real world. We started a script, so we would have a general idea of the "story line". Here is a summary of the game: 1) We split the kids into groups of 5, they brainstorm a team name, and logo. 2) We tell them the task (They have to build replicas of a model) ( Each model is worth 1 Ruby) 3) There are 3 rounds - Round 1: They replicate the model in any fashion - Round 1: They brainstorm how to be most successful before the round starts - Round 3: They do a group share before the round starts. 4) We talk to the kids about how to handle disagreements 5) We talk to them about FTC and Robotics Today we participated in our first ever FTC tournament! It was a long and stressful day, but it was an incredible learning experience, and we feel that it helped us grow as individuals and as a team. The day started out bright and early, and we were prepared and ready to be successful. We called each other from the two cars we were riding in practicing our presentation for the judges interview, and we all became more and more excited. Right as we walked in we realized how different the environment was than FLL , especially because the FLL tournament was happening right next door. From then on, the day was crazy, but the best kind of crazy, filled with lots of great new experiences and things to learn.
We went to the pit area and began to set our stuff up. Before we knew it, it was time for robot inspection, and we raced off to the gym to start that process. It went smoothly and we gladly passed, but our bill of materials wasn't with us, and so Rachel and Ava had to run back to the pit and hurriedly recreate the one we had before. From there we went to field inspection and tested out our autonomous mission, which was very simple. We were surprised to find that very few teams had created an autonomous mission, which helped us to have less anxiety about our own. After that we headed back to the pit, to work on our program a little bit and prepare for our judges interview. Right as we walked into the judges interview we realized how different the experience was from what we had seen in FLL, and how the judges didn't have rubrics, and seemed very interested in what we had to say. The main message that we wanted to show is our goal to spread FTC in Minneapolis schools, as we are the only team from a public school. To do this we volunteer at our old middle school every week to spread a message of the importance of engineering, and show that girls can be successful in engineering just as well as boys can. After that was finishing we got ready for the qualifiers to begin, and everything began to run smoothly as we prepared for the robotics portion of the competition to begin. Going into qualifiers we were very nervous about what was going to happen, and we didn't know what exactly to expect, but we were excited to try something new, and show off all of the hard work we had put into our robot this season. We had some minor connection issues with the new technology, and some other teams had some more major issues, meaning in some rounds our robot was the only one running. In another round, the wheel of our robot literately came off, which caused us to run back to the pit and fix it quickly. In one round our USB hub was not working at all, and we received some help from another team to allow it to work. By the end of the rounds our record was 3-2 and we were ranked 7th, putting us in a good position to be picked for an alliance. Right after that we became slightly nervous however because many of the higher ranked teams were looking like they may pick each other for alliances, putting us in the position to choose one of our own, however did not participate in a large amount of scouting because at the beginning of the day we did not feel like we had the potential to succeed in our first competition. Soon the alliance ceremony began and we were one place away from having to choose our own team. We got chosen for an alliance by 2 teams from Eagan, the blue crew and fourth dimension, which were both teams that could climb the mountain super, super well, so our job in the alliance was to move debris to allow them to do this. The alliance rounds started, and, we participated in 2 of them, due to the fact that our alliance won each of our rounds 2-0, 2-0. Our alliance was the winner of the competition, and we were very excited with how the day had gone. After this we knew that the awards we starting soon, and we were really excited to see how we, and other teams had done. As the awards went on, we saw many of our friends get called up to be successful, and soon we were called up for the connect award, for our outreach in Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as being called up for our winning alliance. Then the state advancing teams were announced, and we were mildly disappointed to find out that we were 7th in the advancing order and 6 teams were able to advance to state. Although we were not advancing, we were excited that the day went to well, and glad that it was such a great learning experience to us. Today we met to finalize a lot of details. We made a lot of progress today on our engineering notebook, including making a photo collage to have as a title slide, and also working on adding our team logo on all of the pages. We added and prepared our business plan as well.
For programming, we finished the intelitek tutorial, and now are totatlly making tthings and changing them on their own. First, we tried using the encoders to make the robot do go the same distance each time. Once we got it working, we realized that it was difficult to do things consecutively in that style of program. We moved it to a different program style (LinearOpMode instead of OpMode). Unfortunately it was still not working. We thought that putting in waitOneFullHardwareCycle would help, but after a while, we figured out that it wasn't going to work, and considering that we only had two days until the competition, we decided to go forward and turn in seconds instead of using encoders. Today we met to work on continuing to prepare for competition, and one important thing was that we printed out our sponsor logo, and added our robot's name; Velma, after the smart girl from Scooby Doo. After we attached that to our robot, we added an emergency power switch, so that we can pass robot inspection, and so that it is easier to power our robot on and off.
Rachel learned a lot about autonomous programming, and we strategized about the ideas for what we hoped to accomplish, one of these ideas have two different versions of a program in order to allow us to be able to work well with other teams. Our idea was to do two different versions of a program, that earned equal points but started in different points and complete different missions. This helps to prevent robots from running into each other. Last night Isabella got the Plexiglas ordered. This means today we were able to drill holes in the Plexiglas and get them on the robot. Ava and Izzie worked on drilling the holes in the Plexiglas, and Adelaide and Isabella worked on printing out logos and numbers to attach to the robot. While drilling the holes we had some difficulties holding the nuts and bolts at the angles required to secure them, but with practice and teamwork it was no problem for us. While we were printing out the logos, we also had problems getting the numerals to be the correct size for our robot to be ready to compete.
Rachel worked on trouble shooting involving the programming. For example, the programs were not downloading onto the phone, which was quite a problem, for us. We looked on the forums for a while to try and solve the differences, and eventually we discovered that this was because we had two different apps on the two different phones. While this took a long amount of time, it helped Rachel to gain comfort with the Java, as well as how the phone system works. Our competition is exactly one week from today. We met to finish up all of the little details that need to get done for next weekend. Focusing especially on our robot, we measured the size of our robot and cut out cardboard cutouts, to make sure we got the correct size when we ordered Plexiglas. Also in a way of improving the robot, we added extra grabbers to our arm in order to be ab,e to push the button on the robot to push the button on the rescue beacon.
We also finalized our presentation as well, and made sure that we covered everything that we wanted the judges to know about us. We talked about the outreach we had been doing recently, working with the teams at our middle school, and teaching them all about FLL and the futures they could have in engineering. We also talked about ourselves and our past, as well as our robots and strategy. We went through the checklist of robotics and decided on things we needed to improve on, like adding a reachable emergency switch. Today we met to work on setting up drive modes for our robot at competition, which Rachel worked on programming. To start out we had the basic type of robot driving, but we disliked some features of it, like how turning worked (moving one wheel) and also that what we wanted to be forwards was backwards. One new type of driving that we tried and really appreciate, is called arcade mode, which is a way of driving that allows us to turn by moving the controller sideways and not just up and down individually. (picture bellow) this allows us to be able to drive faster and more accurately.
We also attached the optical distance sensor to our robot, because we wanted to have sensor options when programming our mission for the autonomous round. This took a while, due to the fact that the prepared holes in the sensor were not the correct size, so we had to zip tie the sensor onto the robot. One advantage of this though, was that where we attached the sensor required us to add a plate on the front of the robot, which also works as a "pusher" to push debris on the floor out of the way. This saved us the struggle of getting debris caught in the back of the robot, and making it difficult to drive straight. We also began our presentation for competitions today, by watching some example videos online, and gained information from there. We practiced timing of the presentation as well. While working on the presentation we did a variety of emailing, including people working at our school's stem day, about us volunteering there to show ways for kids to get involved in engineering, and expand their knowledge. We also ordered our t-shirts for competition, in order to prepare. |
This blog covers details about our outreach events and other events that are important to our team, and our season.
AuthorHi, we are the Rubies, FTC team 9890. To learn more about us, visit the "About Us" page Archives
April 2016
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