The best laid schemes o' mice an' men ...

5.31.11: As Robert Burns once wrote, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley."  If you compare this post to our last one, you'll see I'm a liar 3 or 4 times over. 

In the last post I promised at this second meeting we would, "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."

It's amazing how fast two hours go when a group is thoroughly engaged.  That tidbit plus the fact that, even as a teacher of 18 years, I can be a lousy predictor of time needs for the group collectively forced us to adjust the agenda on the go.  So, you WON'T find student team members writing blog entries yet (perhaps that will begin after the school year concludes), nor will you read about tools, gear ratios, or in-depth vocabulary work (all of those to take place at meetings in the future).

You WILL, however, hear about our work with the brainstorming process and our design notebooks.  Since the "homework" given at the conclusion of meeting one was to read the Gateway rule book, the basic flow of the meeting went like this:

1. Close, group reading of the Gateway game rules along with Q&A for clarification.  Here the six team members and I took turns reading this section of the manual until we had a really good understanding of the game.  We referred our field mock up and game objects from time to time as needed.  For reference, the rule book and corresponding info is found here. 

2. Next, our team members played a few rounds of "Stubots" to better display an understanding of the game and its potential strategies. This is an excellent interactive (and fun) way for team members to better understand a robotics competition game and the rules prior to brainstorming for a solution.  Special thanks to FRC team 116 in Herndon, VA for the idea.  They've been playing "Stubots" for years as an early part of the competition robot development process.  As the team played each round their rules understanding and game strategies became more sophisticated.  Understanding that corner goal scoring is easily "descored" and that there is value in "handing off" game objects from the interaction zone to the isolation zone are two items that pop into mind quickly. Three short videos of this part of the process can be found on the UPR Youtube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/uprobotics#p/a/u/0/lHSSlXj25zI
http://www.youtube.com/uprobotics#p/a/u/1/Rb7w6o_loPk
http://www.youtube.com/uprobotics#p/a/u/2/ZdMuD0ojQ88

3. After Stubots we began the brainstorming process.  First, as individuals, team members listed all of the autonomous and tele-op strategies they could think of.  Then, in small groups they combined their lists and presented the combined lists to the whole team.  This set of lists was posted on our meeting room wall.  Next, as time was running out in the meeting, we began our focus on the "what" of the game ... as in, "What do you want to be able to do?" not "HOW" or pictures or anything else.  Team members started making their individual "what" lists and shared out verbally what they had on them.  While this is still a work in progress, it already seems all team members are in favor of a robot that is quick, agile, maneuverable, potentially omni-directional that is able to score in all goals on the field.

4. The last part of the meeting was students making their engineering notebook entries (define problem-->list task(s)-->reflect/evaluate).  All students wrote about the problem of understanding the game and its rules along with the problem of what to build to play the game.  The reflective process that takes place here is a favorite of mine as, over time, it will mark real growth and learning, and will eventually prevent us from repeating mistakes - even in future years.

In all, a great meeting.  Pictures from this meeting, and other UPR meetings/events can be found on our Flickr account, here. Thanks to Mrs. Meyer for the donuts, LMHS and Bob Foreman for the field tiles, and Mrs. Smith for doing some photography/video.  Homework for our next meeting includes re-reading robot rules, finishing off individual "what" lists, and reading/signing up for the VEX forum.

I have a pretty good hunch what we'll be doing at our next meeting, but I'll refrain from listing anything now.  I don't want to have to quote another famous poet to try and cover up for my improper planning again!
-Kressly