Ideas That Do Not Work For Us

"My biggest failure is I have too many to talk about."
- Dean Kamen

New YouTube video is up!

Our linear shooter that did not work. 

School was cancelled today which was awesome. Except that it made it hard for team members to come in to school and work on the robot. We only had 4 people show up to help. Sometimes less people can mean more focus.

The main struggle that our team is having is what we can do vs. what we want to do. We did a strategic analysis and we read the TwentyFour paper about shooting in 2012. BTW, if you haven't read that article, you really need to. So we know that shooting is not very reliable and there are no guarantees with it. That means we know climbing is the way to go. Unfortunately, we don't know how to do it. We just don't have the inspiration right now. Maybe we will later. So we're going ahead with the shooter robot and 10 point hang for now. Who knows? Maybe things will change later.

Start of a prototype robot.

Our original main goal for today was to put the shooter on the rolling base from yesterday and see what happens. We got kind of sidetracked by other ideas at first. Brandon cut down the curved shooter but got discouraged by the amount of room leftover. Bryce worked on a straight line shooter. We tried many different options but none of them were working. It was pretty down moment. BUT we found our resolve and threw on the curved shooter. AND IT WORKED! It was a very nice moment for us. After so much adversity throughout the afternoon, it was good to finally find something that worked. Plus, it is very consistent in our intitial tests.

The only other developments is that our Business Plan is basically complete. Kacy was not able to come to school but through the power of Google Drive, she was able to still work from home. Jade also did a GREAT job working on the Business Plan today. The next steps are to have it edited by some teachers. Then, it's on to Chairman's Essay!

With all the strategy talk and statistics, it can be easy to lose sight of what works for YOUR TEAM. We discovered some things today that will work for us and that is a big accomplishment.