One Little, Two Little, Three Little Robots...

Well, our coach has been known to do some pretty interesting things before to get us thinking, and this is one of them. He had originally assigned us the job of running through every mission for fifteen minutes to test out the newly built robot (we had used some of our sponsor money to buy a second NXT kit of parts so that we could have two different designs to test at the same time).

After completing this task, he gave us a list of steps to follow. Here is what we came up with.

I. Analyze each mission, comment on observations, challenges encountered and next actions to take

This we did in our fifteen minute encounter.

II. Mission summary
     
Coach asked us to write a blog entry on our experiences, both for the reader's benefit and to cause us to really think through what we have learned.

III. Team Discussion

This is where we got together and discussed what we learned, what changes we needed to make, and to discuss new strategies.

IV. Strategy based on missions  (What is our current strategy as of Today?)

This particular step was actually many steps put together to form a next action. Here, we had to first decide what missions we would do and wouldn't do. We also had to agree upon the order on which we would base our strategy. We had to be able to explain why we chose this particular order and how it would best help the team.
     
We then had to structure the missions so that if we needed to attach or pull anything off we could do so at the beginning and not have to fiddle with pieces in the middle of the competition.
     
After that, we re-visited the missions we had chosen and looked at the amount of points and the possible time it would take. If we had any doubts, we would research it and evaluate it. (Fortunately, we all felt really good about our decisions)
     
After making all the decisions we needed about each mission, we sat down and discussed what changes needed to take place.

V. Clone robot and make improvements

In this step, we took apart the original robot and cloned our newest robot. Therefore, we would end up with a clone that we could test our changes without risking damaging our original robot.
     
We're are now testing to see if we were successful in making an exact clone. I can't wait to see how it will turn out.

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