Thursday, February 3. 2011
“Parentor” Val here – the weather has relented and school is back in session! That means another night of robot building!
The meal tonight was a complete turkey dinner, courtesy of Lizzy’s family. In addition to the turkey, we had mashed potatoes, gravy, fabulous butternut squash stuffing, cranberry sauce, rice, cookies and pie…yum!!
Thursday is Safety Day, so during dinner team captain Crystal quizzed the team on what an MSDS is, what it’s for, and where it can be found. (If you don’t know, it’s a Material Safety Data Sheet, which has info on potentially hazardous chemicals or materials that we may be using, and it can be found in our green Safety binder!) Also during dinner, lead mentor Larry announced that applications for drive team and pit crew are available, and need to be filled out and returned by next Thursday. Good luck to all applicants!
After dinner was the integration meeting. There may be a new design element that both protects the minibot during the match, and helps the robot line up with the tower for the “rat race” at the end…stay tuned to see how it works out!
Lots of parts are coming in and being assembled by the various subteams. The arm is being put together, custom parts for the minibot have come in and are being inventoried, and the LED signal lights are in and are being tested (one interesting discovery – the color of the LED lights changes if there’s a bad alligator clip!).
The essay we need to submit for the Chairman’s Award is still in process. Several people were working on editing it this evening.
Also going on: testing! All the students need to take a test on the game, robot, and safety rules, plus a separate test on the various tools our team uses. Everyone needs to know the basics! Fortunately, students can take these tests once each day until they pass.
The field for the Rochester Rally (coming up on the 20th) is being put together in various hallway areas. The programmers, hanging out in their usual spot at the Precipice of Despair, were coding to the sounds of drilling and hammering tonight. They were happy, though, because they had a package of chocolate chip cookies to snack on – does that mean they had cookies enabled??
Look for another blog entry tomorrow, because Friday will be a replacement for Wednesday’s snow day!
