4 weeks until competition!
Today was a quite productive meeting covering all 3 parts of FLL: Core Values, Project, and Robot Game. Since we had a smaller number of people today, both teams participated in a human knot Core Values exercise together. It was very fun and sometimes painful, especially when Mr. Desrosiers suggested all of us but Furneaux close our eyes and Furneaux was the only one directing everyone to free themselves of the knot. The exercise showed that we need to work on our communication skills, which we can improve on over the next four weeks.
For Robot Game, Joel rebuilt the Compost machine that hadn't been working properly. Jackson and Dennis worked on the Demolition retrieval program and succeeded near the end of the meeting. Dylan continued to improve the design of his attachment to dump bars into the Sorter, which was too heavy and didn't have enough support. Joel also worked with Furneaux to develop a viable attachment for Truck. We also went through the rubrics for robot judging and found that we still need work on keeping our programs consistent, as well as documenting our design process. Moriah revised our strategy and calculated the maximum points we could score is 587, which is quite good. Overall, we still have most of our programs to finish. The toughest challenges to figure out will be Truck and Sorter, but we still have time!
For Project, we held a brief meeting discussing our solution to turn polypropylene (plastic resin #5) into 3D printer filament. We decided to develop an industrial-scale product that would be able to take PP from MRFs, clean, dry, and shred it, and extrude it into filament for use. We still need to contact the experts at WM and at the UMass Lowell Plastics Department to figure out the details, but it's coming along great!
Keep up the good work, Crocobots!
Today was a quite productive meeting covering all 3 parts of FLL: Core Values, Project, and Robot Game. Since we had a smaller number of people today, both teams participated in a human knot Core Values exercise together. It was very fun and sometimes painful, especially when Mr. Desrosiers suggested all of us but Furneaux close our eyes and Furneaux was the only one directing everyone to free themselves of the knot. The exercise showed that we need to work on our communication skills, which we can improve on over the next four weeks.
For Robot Game, Joel rebuilt the Compost machine that hadn't been working properly. Jackson and Dennis worked on the Demolition retrieval program and succeeded near the end of the meeting. Dylan continued to improve the design of his attachment to dump bars into the Sorter, which was too heavy and didn't have enough support. Joel also worked with Furneaux to develop a viable attachment for Truck. We also went through the rubrics for robot judging and found that we still need work on keeping our programs consistent, as well as documenting our design process. Moriah revised our strategy and calculated the maximum points we could score is 587, which is quite good. Overall, we still have most of our programs to finish. The toughest challenges to figure out will be Truck and Sorter, but we still have time!
For Project, we held a brief meeting discussing our solution to turn polypropylene (plastic resin #5) into 3D printer filament. We decided to develop an industrial-scale product that would be able to take PP from MRFs, clean, dry, and shred it, and extrude it into filament for use. We still need to contact the experts at WM and at the UMass Lowell Plastics Department to figure out the details, but it's coming along great!
Keep up the good work, Crocobots!