[Jin Hayashi]

In terms of physics, we would have loved to have made a lighter minibot with a better gear ratio. In terms of practicality,we worked on the KISS principle. KISS won over physics for us.

Our reason for making a big minibot was due to lack of experience and lack of shop resources.

Our team didn't have any experience with FTC before the kickoff. The minibot was built by a student who joined our team three weeks after kickoff and a parent who was a first year FLL mentor. Our minibot used the NXT, due to the mentor's knowledge of NXT programming and its sensors.

We are also working out of the garage of one of our mentors. We had to budget our usage of power tools for building the hostbot and minibot. Which limited the amount of tool time for the minibot team for making it faster.

I was amazed and pleased that we got a minibot working with the amount of experience and resources the two had before shipdate. Although we lost many minibot races with other teams, it was satisfying just to successfully launch the minibot.