[Mark Sheridan]

I think the 3 day robot enhanced our design discussions. For my team, I feel the 3 day robot was a nice ice breaker in the idea discussion it really got ideas flowing. One of our mentors challenged the students to think outside the box, to question the 3 day robots and to think of new criteria for for our design spec. I am really proud that my students started generate different sets of ideas for different design goals. We had collections that prioritized passing, others that emphasized the truss pass and catch and etc. I think ideas are cheap and we are rich in them.

the challenge for us is narrowing the ideas down. Since the 3 day robot videos are so good, the prototyping of other ideas feel inferior. I feel this is very different issue than creating "narrow-mindedness." We had to work really hard to make sure we could generate similar results, yeah some ideas did not make the cut to the prototype phase, some prototypes were abandoned, a few proved the ideas were not sound and few will make it on the robot.

For my team, I feel the 3 day robot was a nice ice breaker in the idea discussion it really got ideas flowing. We just wrapped up our latest intake prototype. I am really impressed, the students tried to take it beyond what the 3 day robots did, went a little to far, they dialed it back a bit and added some more features. I was really impressed the level of work they did to prove it would work. They are also a bit smug, for having a drawing of the mechanism since noon of the kick off day. I think the similarities to the 3 day robots is obvious but knowing its design history makes me very happy. A lot of the time, we used the 3 day robots as a gauge. Some days the prototype worked better than others but it could have lacked an outside perspective. I thought it was really great to compare to the 3 day robots. In the end I hope our intake will live up to the prototype.