About a month ago, we had our last session for the year (meeting 17), plus our demonstration night. For the last meeting, it was fairly quiet. We kept it simple and just practiced the tasks that had been previously completed. Sort of.
One of the boys had his project lost, because it was stored on a local laptop instead of being uploaded to our cloud storage with everything else. It wasn't quite done anyway, but that was a frustration that we're going to try to knock out quickly for next year, with a place to store everything right up front. So he actually picked a different task and was able to get it to work. The task to flush the toilet, which activated a waste processing plant on the other side of the field was pretty neat, yet simple enough to do it quickly.
A couple of the small teams just kind of played around, figuring that they had tested their task well enough the previous week.
One team really spent the entire time running their task over and over again.
When we got to the competition, er demonstration, we went first. I wasn't sure how far along the other teams had gotten, but as I watched them later, they had the same struggles we had.
The team that practiced all day had to run their task about 10 times before it finally worked. It was working four out of five runs in practice and then was just slightly off on the day of. Oh well. The toilet flushing also had to be run several times before it hit just right. Two of the other teams who didn't practice at all the day of had issues.
And one of the boys whose task was always working, every time, hardly ever any issues, didn't show up. And we didn't know how to run his code, since we couldn't find it on the robot's memory. If we knew he wasn't going to be there, we would have had him show us and had someone else practice running it for him. He had cub scouts instead, which is fine. It just would have been nice to know so we could show off another task performed.
We've already started talking about next year, knowing that this year was getting a foundation in place to be able to start early and be ready to do a real competition.
