Team Building

For 2158 team building is where our team comes together and does something other than robotics for a few hours. I know a lot of us eat, breathe, and dream about robotics but sometimes we all need a little break. Even if you don’t need a break others might. On our team’s team building nights the students come in, play video games, board games, card games, and (my favorite part) dodge ball. Team building nights give the students a chance to bond with other people outside of their sub groups and take a small break from robotics. Typically everyone has a great time and comes back to the next meeting recharged.

Dodge ball is always a big hit for the students and every team that competed in 2020-2021 should have a few power cells laying around to play with. To end off dodge ball we usually play a few games of student vs mentors. The mentors have gotten more and more out numbered as we keep growing the team but we put up a good fight.

Team building nights also provide a great source of funny videos that will end up in our end of the year recap video.

(More) Cleaning

In the last post I showed the next area we would be cleaning, the long raw metal storage rack. Well we finally got to it, two students and myself spent a night moving metal around and organizing it. We removed all of the small pieces and set them aside, all medium length pieces went onto the cleaned rack from last time. All of the full length stock got to stay on the rack. Well it got moved off and put back on so we could organize it by material, and shape. The final thing to do was to add a safety strap to the rack. Now it shouldn’t be possible for the metal to fall out of the rack. I don’t have a good storage spot for the small material we removed yet. Right now the small(short) pieces are just hanging out in a tote.

Next Steps

I’d like to clean and organize the raw shaft stock to the right in the before picture, also maybe fix the banner that is falling down. We are also running out of time for the off season, so that means we really need to have all ten of our swerve drive modules assembled, the swerve frame machined and program it all. I’ll be leading a small group in the swerve module assembly for the first few modules until they feel confident enough to build the rest of them with out me. We also need to bullet proof our Neo’s by hot gluing the JST connector to JST joiner board.

Driver practice is going to be starting up next week. I’m not sure what the exact game plan will be yet. I’m thinking of adding an additional meeting and having time at the end of each of our existing meetings to run a few drills. I want to run a more structured practice this year. I am going to put some effort into creating a set of drills to run. In addition I think we will set up a goal similar to last years hub on the field and have the students practice against that with the real robot and the practice bot. In addition to drive time I plan on spending a bit of time talking about strategy and robot position. We will also watch some match videos and spend some time discussing what went well and what could have been better.

A lot of work to do and not a lot of time left!