Friday, January 13, 2012

One Down, 5 Weeks to Go!

The build season for FIRST is finally here!  Everyone is scrambling around figuring out the design, finding parts, prototyping, and delegating important tasks.  There's so much to do in these upcoming 6 weeks, we better get started now!

On Monday, all the girls got together and watched a presentation about some possible features for the robot.  There were a lot of good ideas, but we had to narrow them down.



After a brainstorming session, we broke into small groups, drew a design of each group's robot and presented their idea to the other girls. The girls presented a lot of good ideas, and after another brainstorming session on Tuesday, we narrowed our options to 3 distinct robots.





The next time we met, on Thursday, we began the exciting process of prototyping our robot in small groups. It was nice to see all the girls working together and learning new things about building robots.  Some girls learned how to wire robots, attach wheels, use power tools, and figured out what goes where.  After some time, we all watched each small part come together to make the chassis of each robot.



 So far, we're all having a really good experience teaching each other and learning new things about assembling robots.  Saturday is the day of the Open Field event where families and other teams can come and see our Rebound Rumble field pieces and try out their own robots.