The Lego robotics team met several times in December and are now in January, with the competition in two days!
We have pretty much put together their space-related problem presentation. We had decided initially on several possible issues and voted on the one they wanted to go with. There were a lot of unrealistic things, such as alien attacks and so forth, which got dropped out of the running. At the end of the day, they voted on the problem of sleeping while weightless and something to keep them tethered so they wouldn't float around. On the day they were working on the presentation, I was helping one group and someone else another group, and the problem somehow got changed to scratching an itch on your nose while on a spacewalk. So that's what we're going with.
We have four missions they are going to attempt. One of them pretty much works 90% of the time. Another works about 75% of the time. On both of them, it comes down to whether they can get the robot positioned in the right place when it starts. We practiced having every team member know where to place the robot in case anyone doesn't make it. Last year, we had the issue of someone who didn't come for the final presentation and he was the only one who knew where to place the robot to make his program run. On the other two, they work maybe 10% of the time.
Suddenly yesterday, with just one meeting before the competition, we had some of the team members come up with some new ideas, hey, why don't we change the arm on this one and why don't we try to do this other mission, too? I basically told them that those would be great things to do if we had more time, but with the competition Saturday, there's not time to get it just right and practice it so it is polished.
