Wrapping Things Up

Meeting 16 of the Robotic Dudes was fairly low key today. We hadn't met last week due to school being out of session on Thursday. Next week is our final meeting, and that evening we will hold a demonstration/competition among the various teams at the school for the families.

Some involved are very hesitant to call it a competition, favoring instead the demonstration aspect of it, but Lego talks about coopertition being a key principle of the challenges - a combination of cooperation and competition. We want to work together and learn from each other, but we also want to try hard to win. So I hope we win. ;)

We kept it kind of quiet today. We had everyone work on repeating their tasks several times to make sure everything was set up where it needed to be, with the robots pointing in just the right direction. A rotation of just a couple degrees in angle could result in the robot being several inches off from where they needed to be for their tasks.

There were one or two of the team who were starting to work on a totally new task on the complete opposite side of the field, which I tried to explain wasn't likely to be done by the time we show things off next week. In the end, I just let them do what they wanted to do.

This whole first year really has been setting us up for success next year. There are a lot of things we'll be able to look at doing different or better, in addition to having some experienced people on the team. The one thing from my observations and interactions that I'd like to see is just overall taking things a little more seriously. Now, I'm all for having fun and enjoying one another's company, so I'm not talking about being more serious. We just need some more organization and help with focusing on working on the tasks and learning more about methods of programming that will take our performance to the next level. I'd also like to not being losing and breaking parts all the time. Half the challenge board is disassembled, so we can't even do all parts of the challenge. If someone wants to do a Legos club where they just build whatever they want, someone can sponsor that, but for Lego Robotics Club, we should be building some awesome robots. I'm looking forward to that.