VRC 1414's first ever meeting

5.11.11:  VRC Team 1414 assembled at my house for the first time this evening.  We'll be meeting in the basement for our pilot year.  It was great seeing parents at team members (4 UPR veterans from our FLL teams and two rookies).  Mitchell, Bryan, Ben, Jonas, Justin, and Casey got to know each other pretty well through an introductory go around, an activity known as "three truths and a lie", and by scripting and executing an introductory video for the UPR Youtube Channel. 

Each team member received their safety glasses and binder packed with Inventor's Guide (thanks UPR VP John Niziolek), Engineering Notebook and entry spec sheet, full copy of the VRC Gateway Manual, and vocabulary handout.

I spent a chunk of the meeting going over key concepts we will focus on this year, including the UPR motto of "tachquiwi" (which is Lenape for "together"), professionalism,  the fun/learn balance, documenting like you will evaporate (just turned that phrase five minutes before the meeting and I really like it), sharing with the community, iterative design, elegant simplicity, ERB (expected repeatable behavior), and LYD (loving your data).

We also unpacked all of our VEX equipment order and got things in proper storage, made our first design notebook entries using the simple "Identify Need/Problem --> Perform Task(s )--> Reflect/Evaluate -->" loop (which they caught onto faster than I thought they would), and watched the Gateway game animation just before calling it a night.

The most important part of the meeting came early on when I went over all of the donors who have funded this start-up (see http://www.uprobotics.org/donors.html), what it meant to have them believe in us so much, and how we could pay them all back with our time, effort, attention ... and respect (which Jonas was quick to point out).

Special thanks to all parents for getting the team members to the meeting promptly and to Mitchell's mom who sent along cupcakes.  I have a really positive feeling about how fast this group was able to work together and look forward to seeing their cohesiveness and productivity grow along with their design skills and knowledge.  They all left the meeting with homework to read the Gateway manual and to peruse the Inventor's Guide for lessons to learn. 

Next meeting in a few weeks - we will concentrate on the brainstorming process, learn about our tools, learn gear ratio, and do some more in depth work with our vocabulary and design notebooks.  Look for the student team members to take over and rotate into blog entry duty starting at the next meeting.  Getting everyone's perspective here should be a lot of fun.
-Kressly