Wednesday, January 13. 2010
Hmmm…does it make sense to keep counting up, or should we switch and start counting down? What do you think?
What we ate for dinner! Tonight’s meal was provided by Rachel’s parents and was PIZZA! We had a choice of plain cheese, vegetable, sausage and peppers, or pepperoni! Tossed salad, and cookies rounded it out!
The can bags have been set up for the team to use for soda cans and new in New York, water bottles, which now have a five cent deposit on them! Theo has started a team “can and bottle drive” and there are boxes located throughout the school as collection points.
Speaking of Theo, I caught a little flak for leaving out the field building team’s efforts last night. So that was my first stop tonight! A much smaller crew than last night was working on rebuilding the platform / tunnel, replacing the too short screws with longer ones. They described last night’s efforts as a snowstorm of sawdust, as they had cut all the pieces to make the bump sections for the field. Rumor is that Kyle’s mom wouldn’t let him in the house because he was so covered with sawdust! (We build the field not only for testing the robot as it gets built, but to have it ready for the Rochester Rally when we invite all the teams within a driving distance to come and try their robots on a full scale field.)
Mentor Amy kicked out the blogger (me) because she said I was disturbing the field sub-team, so I am off to complete my tour of the sub-teams. Just to give you and idea on how scattered we are:
Leaving the lower shop where the field elements are being built, I go up 17 steps and around the corner to the upper shop. Hey! It’s alumnae, Jackie N., here to get her robot fix. She is with a crew led by Alumni / College mentor Graeme working on assembling tough box transmissions – without directions. Hmmm. I hope that works out for them.
Also in this room is part of the programming team working on the camera (Tonight, they were successful in getting it to show up on the drivers station!) Reminder from Calvin: when the robot is ON, hands need to be away from the robot. Thanks, Calvin, for making safety a priority!
Twenty paces later I’m in Mr. Brewer’s room. Tresten is updating the Wiki, our team’s repository of our technical activities! I love it when I see students updating the Wiki! The electrical sub-team is engaged in one of my favorite activities, online shopping! Will they shop ‘till they shock?!? At the other end of the room, the mechanical team is watching and re-watching the GDC movie to see some of the physics that was used in designing the game. Wow! Look at the trajectory of that soccer ball!
Out of Mr. Brewer’s room, it is 40 paces to G4, Mrs. Martina’s room. We ate in the back half of it tonight. In the front half, Val (another team Super-mom) is bringing Miss MacLean up to speed on our website, forum and other computer “stuff.” Also in the room is part of the programming sub-team, discussing ideas for autonomous modes. Mentor Jeff is pretending to move like a robot to help the students visualize the steps needed to accomplish various tasks. He’s really good at that!
Ok, my tour is finished for tonight! Time to post! Until the blog gets moved into a real blog location, if you want to make comments, post them in the “Re: Comments Re: BLOG 2010!” thread.
This just in: Check out our forum for an update on our collection for the memorial gift for the Habitat for Humanity. Go team!
This is not a two by four!
