Double Up

For the last week of November and moving forward, we've added an extra session each week. Instead of just meeting on Wednesdays right after school, we will be meeting on both Wednesdays and Thursdays. There is a lot to get done with the competition coming up fast.

We broke out on Wednesday and Thursday of this week into groups and had various people working on different missions. One of the missions is close, with the group that has been focusing and working on things. Focus is definitely an issue, as we have a lot of kids and it's difficult to get them all on task at the same time. We've had some parents coming in to help with crowd control a bit, which has been good.

We did have some of them working on a new mission, which functions kind of like the big mallet and bell at a carnival, where you hit the target with the mallet or sledgehammer and it makes the weight go up and hit the bell, except it's a spaceship that has to go high enough to get into orbit. It's a fun one to work on, although to me it seems more error-prone. I assigned one of the team to be in charge of thinking about risk vs. reward and the likelihood of something working or not working to help us focus on the things we know we can accomplish and get some points out of. Not that we shouldn't try hard things, but we want to get some points.

We did confirm the name Digicorns. I guess they're all set on that, so there we go.

The Mission

For our second meeting on November 14, we talked about name options some more. The two top names ended up being Digicorns (portmanteau of Digital and Unicorns) and Rockets. My preferred name from last year, Botrockers, didn't make the final list, which was unfortunate. I told them we would decide between the two names the next week after they had a chance to think about it and make sure they felt good about it.

We also finished building the stock robot this day. A few of the missions were built, so we could show how to do them. We also watched some videos of other people solving the various missions. They had a homework assignment to go home and watch some videos of the various missions and decide which ones they wanted to work on, based on what they thought they could realistically accomplish.



A big issue at this point was realizing the competition is going to be on January 5, instead of February 2, giving us a month less time to get ready.

New Team New Name

I haven't been keeping up with writing down what we've been doing each week. So I'm going to try to go back and reproduce things here as to what we've done over the past month. Our first meeting was on November 7. We kept things fairly simple and talked about team name ideas, introduced everyone, and talked about what some of the missions would be.

We also started building the basic robot. The field wasn't put together yet, but the plans were to have it ready in the next week or two.