Our Journal
Check back here often for updates on what we've done!
Journal Posts:
- More work... - 12/2/08
- We are Going to the State Championship!
- Continuing Work... - 10/1/08
- Working on the Robot and Project - 9/24/08
- Robot Design - 9/17/08
- Planning - 9/10/08
- Challenge Released! - 9/5/08
- Our First Meeting - 8/27/08
More work...
On Dec. 1 we went to the Western Virginia Water Authority to present our project idea to them. We learned a lot! This facility uses a purification system called an Upflow Clarifier system. We got to see the filtration system. Each one 4 filters can purify 6 million gallons of water! They told us that they have not turned a pump on to collect water from the river since May. We are in a drought.
On Dec. 2 we met to revise our project presentation, as well as practice running the robot. We finally got our robot run down to 2 minutes 22 seconds. Tomorrow we will meet to practice our presentation and run the robot more.
We are Going to the State Championship!
On Saturday, Nov. 15, we competed in the Lynchburg Regional Tournament. We won the Research Project First Place, Division 2, award. We also are advancing to the State Championship on Dec. 6-7. We had a rough start with the robot, with our first and second rounds both being 90 points. We finally achieved one of the top scores at 135 points. LenTech Red, another homeschool team, got the highest robot score of the day at 160. They also won the Overall Champion award First Place. We are looking forward to seeing them again at state.
We plan to continue meeting to revise the robot to get more points.
Continuing Work...
Today, we split up and built separate robots, so we could look at many ideas and pick the best one. We started to program some of the missions. We programmed the "Ride a Bike", "Telecommute and Research", and "Insulate a House" missions, as well as starting the "Raise the Flood Barrier" mission.
We brainstormed about some different climate problems, and decided that David would write a letter to Jerry Stenger, who talks on the Virginia Farm Bureau Climate Advisory show.
Our homework was to research the climate problems we came up with.
Working on the Robot and Project
We did a lot today! We started off with looking at the amount of meeting time we have left. We were surprised when we saw that we had used a little over a third of our meeting time!
After that, we discussed our team logo. We all thought about how our team name describes us, and drew some basic logos. After that, we voted on which logo we would use. Andrew is going to work on the logo during the week.
Then we went downstairs to work on the robot's chassis, while Andrew worked on the Mission Analysis sheet our coach made for us. The Mission Analysis sheet will help us see which missions need to be done in what order, assess any risk involved, know which missions are hardest, think about sensors involved, grouping of missions, and who does what. We did not get much done on the chassis, so we decided that some of use would meet on Friday to do more mission analysis, and build the chassis to fit the missions.
We thought that each of us should be specialists in a topic, that way, if one of us has a question about anything, he goes to the specialist for the answer. We then all chose a topic to be a specialist in.
As homework for this week, we are going to re-read the project description, and research our climate.
Robot Design
Today we went over some robot design principles, and made a list of things we want in our chassis. Our coach took us downstairs to look at the board and we thought about how to do some of the missions. We were just dying to build our robot at this point, so we sat down and tried out some different design ideas.
While we were building, our coach told us to think up some ideas for our team name. We decided on RoboRubiks. Next week we will think about some logos.
Our homework for this week was to build a chassis/robot and bring it to the meeting next week.
Planning
Today we covered a lot of things. First, we thought about what makes a good team, and read over some quotes about teamwork. We also watched a video of another FLL team to look for how they implemented teamwork, robot design, and how well they had practiced their robot run.
We also thought about how we were going to do the Robot Game, so we would have a plan to follow. We then looked at the FLL board and practiced setting it up, as well as thinking how the mat would look at the end of a successful (400 points) match.
After snack, we thought about some good robot design practices, such as being robust, modular, and simple. Our coach handed out a copy of the book "FIRST LEGO League, the Unofficial Guide" to each team member and told us to read about the good design practices, especially in Chapter 10.
Our homework is to look at some of the design practices in Chapter 10 of the book our coach loaned us, and to think about how we will accomplish the missions.
Challenge Released!
We met to see the challenge released today, and had a pizza party. Unfortunately, the challenge was late in being released, so after we had pizza, we built the mission models. Finally, the challenge was released, and we read over the missions. As homework for this week, we have to read over the missions and the rules, and watch the mission videos.
Our First Meeting
Today we had our first meeting. We got to know each
other by playing a game, and learned a little about what we all have
in common.
After that, our coach gave us a general idea of what FIRST LEGO
League is, and what we do in it. We went over our goals and the FLL core values so
we have a good idea of what to work towards during the season. We
thought about some ideas on how to make group decisions, like
t-shirt color and different attachment designs.
We also did an activity that showed how important it is to use specific instructions, as a robot will only do what it is told. We broke into two teams and were each given a bag of LEGO parts, and built something out of them. We then wrote down instructions on how to build it. We gave the instructions and an identical bag of parts to the other team for them to build. When the instructions were more specific, the models looked much more similar.
We had a great time!
We will meet again on September 5 for a Pizza Party and to review the Challenge when it is released.