Demo Day

We don't have a robotics club meeting today, since it is a half day of school. Last week, we did have our 15th meeting. We are looking at holding our competition / demonstration at the end of this month, just before spring break. The idea is then at that time, a lot of things like soccer and other outdoor activities start happening as the weather warms up and we get closer to the end of the school year. So I think once we have that demonstration, while it's possible that some of the boys may want to continue meeting, we will likely be done for the year at that point. We're looking into shirts or medals or something to hand out as a reward for participating.

So last week we worked for a while on polishing up what we were working on. We talked about being realistic and what they thought we could get finished up by the end of the month. I had each of the small teams work on what they were close on and demonstrate what they had. They didn't have to be perfect, just show where they were at, so we could judge how close it seemed like they were.

We basically have four activities that look like they are close, that people have been working on. One of them is pretty complicated and may or may not be finished. Two are basically functioning most of the time now. Every now and then they don't totally work, but as they work on fine tuning them, such as making sure the robots start from the same place every time and so on, I think that success rate will go up. The fourth task should be simple, but more often than not it ends up being kind of a brute force, run over the parts type of thing, which maybe technically works, but it would be nice if we can get that one working without knocking everything over.

It was nice to see some success. I know part of the goal with the robotics this year is to be prepared to do something bigger (and earlier) next near. Most of the tasks we've completed are fairly simple ones, close to the home base and don't take much maneuvering to get to. What would be great is if next year we could purchase the whole challenge kit and have the table ready right as school was starting. That way we could have the teams start meeting and knock out some of the basic tasks quickly, freeing them up to work on some of the more advanced parts or the ones that are difficult to get to on the other side of the board.