The competition was on a Saturday (back in January). It was cold and early, but it wasn't very far from our house, which I appreciated. There were 11 teams, including two from our school. I think there was supposed to be 10 teams, but due to some lack of communication all around, our team got registered late, and they were kind enough to let us still register. Poor communication was something I fought with the entire season.
We showed up early and set up on our table. Each team had a table about two and a half feet by two and a half feet in the hallway to set up our things on. We didn't have a poster like many other teams did. We had a laptop with a PPT presentation for our research problem, so we fired that up and would run through it with those who stopped to take a look.
There were several tables set up in an open area right next to us, which we could practice the missions on. We found that on one of our missions the robot was running short for some reason. I don't know how that happened, but it did, and the kids fixed it.
There are four main aspects to the judging. The first is the most obvious - points scored in actual competition. We ran three times and took our highest score. The second is the robot design discussion, where the team meets with some judges and talks to them about how they designed the robot, both physically and the programming behind it. The third is a research problem related to the theme for the year (this year was space - last year was water). The fourth is team dynamics - how well everyone gets along and works together.
We had four missions we attempted. There are some others we could have done if the team had more focus. Two missions we pretty much had solid. One was so-so, and the other one we pretty much knew it wasn't going to work. In all three runs, the robot got stuck at some point and had to be rescued, which is a small penalty. Only having to grab it once each was pretty good, I thought. After the first run, the kids thought of a way to add some rubber pieces to add more grip to the robot arm to help it accomplish the task they were struggling with. After the second run, they decided to bag the mission that they knew wasn't going to work and just focus on the one they had a chance with. In the third run, they were able to get the third mission completed by running the mission several times, utilizing the extra time they saved by not attempting the one they knew wasn't going to work. I was so proud of them. They were as focused as they had ever been and worked well as a team. The were troubleshooting and adjusting and improving each time.
In the robot design portion, they did okay. We had a large team, and the judges noted that with so many team members, we should have been able to accomplish more missions. That said, at the coaches meeting in the morning, other team coaches were surprised that both teams from our school were the max size (10). I think the coaches recognized something that the judges didn't, which was that more people on the team doesn't mean more work gets done. The phenomenon is clearly addressed in one of my favorite books, The Mythical Man Month (Brooks). The three second version is that just adding more people to your project doesn't mean you're going to get more work done in less time. I can see how having a team of 3 or 4 would be much more effective and efficient than dealing with 10 (we actually had 12, which was over the official limit).
In the research project portion, they had talked about a variety of space-related problems, such as getting attacked by aliens and how to sleep without floating around the space station. They ended up going with scratching your nose with a space suit on. I had turned the kids over to another volunteer to work on deciding what problem to go with, and that's what they came up with. They did really well with it. They started by showing the below video, stepped through several possible ideas they came up with (the best was a trained pet squirrel that could move around in the suit and scratch where you needed), and then showed why their solution was the best choice to provide relief safely, while keeping the hands free to work on the space walk. The judges appreciated both the video to show that it was a real problem and the prototypes they made and brought.
The part that we prepared for the least and that they performed the worst on was the core values (or team building) portion. I hadn't spent much time looking into what that part of the competition would look like, so we kind of winged it going into it. Each team member had one core value that they provided a brief description of. After discussing each of the values, the judges had the team solve a problem together. They had some sand in a little foil tray and a pile of straws and rubber bands and popsicle sticks and had to build a Mars lander that could sit on the surface and not get blown away by the fierce Martian wind. I'll just say they provided good counterexamples to most of the values they had so aptly described moments earlier. The highest score they got on the rubric was related to the team working on their own without interference from the coach, since I pretty much turned around and looked out the window as I couldn't watch. That said, I honestly think it was a fair approximation of how we worked together throughout the season. They did work well in most of the competition other than this component, but our twice-weekly meetings were very chaotic.
I really was proud of them, and so was our principal who attended the competition. A few weeks later in February, we had a STEM night at the school and met one more time just before that event to talk about what we would do for a demonstration. The team was all wondering why we weren't still meeting and wanted to continue working on things even though the competition was over. I appreciated that and gave them one of the secret mission challenges to work on. It was fun to work on it, but it reinforced to me that it was time to be done meeting. Having the competition to work towards was one of the few things keeping them mildly focused.
Based on how things went last year and this year, I think the thing to do is to have a couple levels of teams. I think having an introductory team that meets in the second half of the year to learn basic skills and then from that group have tryouts for next year's competition teams would help. The competition teams need to be 5 or fewer team members, made up of only those with enough technical skills and maturity/focus. We had something like 50 or 60 students sign up wanting to do the team, so we maxed out our teams to get as many involved as we could, while still not being able to include everyone. The competition team needs to be chosen before the year even starts, so that in August, they can set up the missions and immediately begin working. Both this year and last year, we lost a lot of time due to the mission field not being set up. We had a variety of skill levels on the team, with some members very advanced and able to perform complex tasks, and others that just wanted to build random things out of Legos and couldn't write a program to make a robot drive in a straight line. Having an introductory team to draw from based on observing their work would make the competition team much stronger, as well as allowing more time to teach some of the basic skills to those that were brand new to robotics.
