Meetings

We are having double meetings this week and next to get prepared for the competition.  We met on Monday and completed a couple more missions (yay!  more points!).  Tonight we worked on designs for our Core values poster.  We have some great ideas and artwork that we will be transferring to a poster at the next meeting.

We also worked on cleaning up the robot by removing extra programs from it and trying to get our programs named well and on the robot in the order we want to run them.  We also worked on our design notes.

Meeting updates

I have not been doing a very good job keeping up on posting meeting notes when we are done with the meetings, so this post will be an update on our progress thus far.

Robot
We have a pretty good program to do the sorting mission.  We can drive the robot out with fair consistency using the lines on the board to help us.

We have been working on the salvage and composting missions the last couple of meetings.  We have been having difficulties getting the two missions to work consistently, so we are working on getting just the first mission (salvage) working correctly.  After we can get it to work consistently, we will try to add the composting mission back to the program.

Project
We have decided that we are going to try to do some recycling at lunch at Creekside for our project.  The kids noted that there is no recycling of lunchtime items and they felt they could make an impact by introducing some recycling there.

We first thought that recycling the milk cartons would be a great idea.  We contacted the company that supplies milk to the school and found that the cartons are not recyclable because they have been soaked in wax to keep the milk from soaking through the carton.

We met with Mrs. Reich last week to discuss being able to do something like this at the school.  They are currently formulating a plan of what they want to try to recycle and will run a week long test at the school so they can gather measurements of how much impact they are having.  The kids that attend Creekside will be helping out with this experiment.

Meeting - September 28th

Robot Game progress

The kids spent tonight working on the program to complete the sorting mission.  In this mission, the robot needs to go out and spin a wheel to get the sorter to sort out the pieces that are in the hopper.  The kids decided that putting a wheel on a motor sticking out the side would be a great way to solve this issue.  They figured using this technique should allow them to complete the mission more quickly.

As they worked on getting the robot out to the sorter, they originally were using rotations (number of times the motor spins) to control how far the robot goes.  In the past we have had issues with using this method because depending on how charged the robot is, the number of spins can move the robot a different amount.  They added a color sensor onto the robot to ensure it is where they want it to be before turning.  This should allow the robot to be able to repeat the mission the same even with variations.

After getting the robot to the right spot, they needed to make sure their wheel touched the wheel on the sorter.  They had to switch out the wheel with a bigger one to make sure it met.  When they tried it, it turned out that the wheels had a lot of friction with one another and the robot was pushed off the sorter wheel.  The kids made the robot move back very slowly to compensate, and this seemed to fix the issue.

Project progress

The kids are very excited about the project this year.  We have found something that hits close to home with them.  This year's theme is Trash Trek.  They need to find issues surrounding the trash that we produce, and figure out how to solve it.

Most of the kids on the team go to Dexter schools, and they said that the school doesn't recycle anything from lunch.  They have been doing research on how much trash is produced and what kind of changes they could make to reduce the trash.

They have been working on composing an email to the principal of Creekside to have a meeting to talk about some possibilities for recycling.

Meeting September 21st

Sorry all, looks like I missed a meeting post.

Progress:
This week we split the kids into two teams.  One team worked on robot design and programming and the other did some great research on the Trash Trek challenge.

The kids had previously looked at all of the missions and noted what kinds of attachments they might want for each mission so they could figure out what the base robot design would be.  This week they started building the robot with one of the attachments that they would need.

For the project, the kids started talking about how they might be able to make a difference locally.  They all talked about how Dexter Schools don't do much recycling at lunch.  They did a lot of research to find out how much trash is generated by a typical school at lunch.  They also found some great resources for helping kids start a recycling program.

Meeting September 9th

Model Building

Unfortunately, we were a little light on attendance tonight, but with the kids we had, we were able to nearly finish all of the models.

Coach Blair, Coach Becky and Grant worked after the meeting to finish all of the models and get the table nearly set up correctly for missions.

Project

We talked a little bit about different types of trash that we generate.  We need to narrow down our options and determine what we want to learn more about.

This week I am planning on logging the trash that I generate, what I recycle, what I reuse, and what I compost.  I am also planning on doing some research to find videos of how different materials can be recycled/reused to give the kids some ideas.

Next Meeting

Reminder, we are switching to Monday meetings starting next week.

August 26th Meeting

We had our first official meeting tonight!  We worked on building out the mission models and watched the first couple of videos about this year's missions.  (If you missed them, or want to watch them again, you can see them all here: http://www.firstlegoleague.org/challenge/2015trashtrek).

As I mentioned in the email I sent out yesterday, we have a Twitter account now...our twitter name is @dexbotsFLLTeam.

I wanted to give a shout out to Kristen for hanging out with us tonight and bringing her laptop so the kids had another device to use for building instructions.  Having the extra adult at the meetings made things run very smoothly.

To close out, I thought I would add a few pictures from the meeting tonight.

First Meeting

We only had a couple of parent's show up tonight for our first meeting of the season.  We are in need of additional kids to participate this year, so if you know of anyone, please have them contact us at dexbots@gmail.com.

Meeting Minutes

We received the mat and pieces for the competition already, but are still waiting for the build instructions.  FLL said it would be posted this coming Tuesday (the 25th).

We asked parents to be more involved this year to help us help the kids get more done.  In the past, we have not done well on the project because we were very focused on the robot.  Having another adult help will allow us to provide more guidance on the project, and allow us to do much better in that section of the competition.  We have a volunteer that is willing to help out at the meetings.

At this point in time, we are planning on meeting at our house.  We have a big area that we can have the board set up (and leave it set up) for the kids without impacting our living space.  Once we get additional team members, we may change this plan, but for now it stands.

We decided that we are typically going to meet on Monday evenings from 6-7:30pm.  However, since we won't have the build instructions until Tuesday next week, we are going to meet on Wednesday next week from 6-7:30pm.  We will not meet during the first week of September, and since the following Monday is Memorial Day, we will be meeting on Wednesday the 9th from 6-7:30pm.

After that, we will start our normal Monday night schedule.

I will be creating a Google Calendar with the meeting schedule on it to share with everyone.

My action items from the meeting are to make some fliers to send to Dexter schools to get in the monthly email to try to get more kids involved.  Also, I will send the same flyer to Rocks & Robots, Brain Monkey's and our mailing list to have people pass around as they see fit.