Day 3 and we’re still going strong! Today we met and discussed wheels and drive systems and we’ve now got a pretty good idea of what we’re going to do.
After much debate and discussion, and CAD mock-ups we’ve also got a good plan for how we’re going to deal with the tube scoring mechanism.
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Prototypes have been started, but we’re not showing much here….
We brainstormed by playing a game of “pass-the-tube” to generate ideas for how to grab or fling or move the logo pieces. Some of our ideas were pretty ridiculous, but that’s what brainstorming is all about.
Others in the group made good headway in constructing various parts of the field. We’re not sure how to store such large racks in our classroom!
We took breaks for dinner, snacks, and also homework. Homework is very important!
We are thrilled to have another article to add to our media binder. We were in the Whig Standard today with the Cyber Falcons (team 3710). Kick off was mentioned on several local radio stations as well. Pretty soon everyone in Kingston will have heard about us.
To spread the word about our club, and try to show people what fun we have, we put together a display for the case in front of the main office. We put two of our game pieces in there for safe keeping, along with some tools that we don’t need for the next week, and several colour pictures of our team in action.
We asked our members, new and old, to give us a phrase to explain our team, or to dispel myths about what goes on at robotics club. Each answer was cut out and taped to the glass on the front of the display case.
Here’s the most recent robotics hat, made by the masked man himself. There’s even a knitted tongue sticking out! You’ll never know what you’re going to see at robotics…
A very generous donor has given us their used scooter. It has some issues that are not worth fixing, but it has lots of working parts too! We look forward to dissecting it and putting the pieces to good use in our prototyping and our robots.
We got our new purple shirts today! It’s just in time for our FLL practice tournament on Saturday. There’s still some details to sort out–we’ve had some last minute additions to our tournament roster. Scheduling 8 teams on the game table requires a bit of math!
There was a lot to smile about today- much work was accomplished and much fun was had while doing it. Much of the session was dedicated to the prototyping of a ball shooting mechanism for the robot.
The creativity of K-Bots greatly came into play here; Joy concocted a ‘gastronomic device’ which is a funnel-shaped mechanism that would work from within the robot- sort of like a stomach and an esophagus, with the balls being “vomited”. Repulsive sounding, yes, but brainstorming is allowed certain ugliness.
We also received a package for our beta-testers. It’s so exciting to be able to start our testing with our new hardware.
Our team of keen programmers are learning lots every day! We have many new members who are excited to see the guts of last year’s robot, and learn how the programming makes it move and operate.
Our builders were hard at work refining our prototypes as well.
We have put up our calendar, media coverage, some photos, folders with forms and newsletters, and now our very first edition of the K-Botics Quarterly. Check it out for yourself! We’re going to mail newsletters to our sponsors in the fall, winter, and spring. We want everyone to be very informed this season!
Maybe this was inspired by some of our knitted hats?
Josh has been wearing his new hat all day! 
We were glad to have a visiting member of the 
We also devised a plan for loading up our launcher with close to 20 balls. We know that we are limited to three at a time for our competition, but it was fun to watch them all get launched at once.
