9/27/2007, Meeting Agenda, pics from 9/13

Announcements
Strategy, continued
Training

• Trialbot1 review


• Design process

Organization
Schedule

"Trialbot1"

9/20/2007 Meeting Agenda

Thanks to the Toennies for lending their laptop for our meetings. We now have 2 good computers for programming and 1 for project work.

Project research done by the team will be presented during the 1st half of the meeting, followed by robot design review and challenge planning. The boys will be encouraged to think like a robot for this exercise.

Mr. Emge attended the NXT training meeting and got some good design ideas and Lego tech support contacts.

Next week is the coaches' meeting.

9/13/2007 Meeting Minutes

We spent the first part of the meeting discussing the challenge and how we need to solve to fundamental problems of strategy and robot design. The team broke up into 2 groups, 1 for robot design and 1 for strategy.

Robot builders: they took a departure from our test robot, "tri-bot", and built one that has a built in catcher on the front. There are some concerns with the robot as is and the boys will have to pick what is good about it, learn from its shortcomings, and come up with a better one. Some concerns are traction, size, sturdiness and turning radius.

The strategists had a hard time focusing on the task at hand, partly due to the size of the group, but they did come up with some good ideas. The coaches' homework this week is to think about how we can better keep focus on a group this large. One idea was to get a second robot kit. We have enough money to buy it from what has been collected, but then we may be short for t-shirts and misc. expenses later.

Homework for the group:

• Mrs. Naughton passed out assignments for the project. Each member has a topic for doing some research and reporting back to the group.
• Mr. Emge asked each member to think about how they would meet the challenge. What order would they perform the tasks and what sort of robot would they need? One idea is to picture yourself as the robot. You have wheels and attachment(s). You are a thinking robot but can only see with sensors and move with the motors- how do you meet the challenge?

See you all Thursday

2007 Challenge Announced!

The challenge link has been added to the right. Tomorrow's meeting will concentrate on the project first and the robot challenge second. We will keep this priority until the project is mostly complete, working on robot challenge strategy, robot building ideas and a line following algorithm in parallel.

Parents - please send in your consent forms. Copies were sent home and copies are available at the link to the right.

We've requested January regional tournaments. Assigned dates will be announced on 10/30.

Congratulations Alex!

Alex won the cub scouts Rain Gutter Regatta this past Sunday. Also competing from Supernova were Patrick, Paul and Danny. More pictures can be found at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/dgemge/RainGutterRegattaPack662007

Meeting Minutes, 8/23/2007

The meeting flew by today. The team tried to put together the puzzle pieces on the map but we decided to defer that to work on some challenges.

The team populated the table with the challenge pieces that they built during the last two meetings. We discussed what we might need to do for the challenge and some strategy.

Paul was modifying the robot for moving uranium and corn.
Joey was working with Paul to also deploy the satellite solar panel with the same robot.
Paul, Nate and Alex were programming the robot to move corn.
Michael and Joey were programming it for the satellite.
Danny, Patrick and Andrew were programming it to move uranium.

With only 1 robot, Joey and Michael had some down time and went through a hands-on discussion of gear types and ratios.

Meeting Agenda, 8/23/2007

• Populate the table with challenge assemblies.
• Discuss what the challenge might be based on the mat and pieces.
• Put together the power puzzle.
• 3 teams working on programming a mini challenge, learning about gears and discussing how the challenge is judged. We'd like to have some working robots to show on Saturday.
• "Homework:" Most teams have matching T-shirts with their name and logo. What should Supernova's logo be?