[sanddrag]

Here is our pretty detailed schedule

Saturday 1/8: Kickoff at 6 am at Clark. Very important for the mentors involved in design to be part of these first moments. Teacher will prepare activities (and solicits ideas from all) to explore scoring strategies after the video feed. After lunch we unpack the kit and discuss what we have to work with. Finish the day with additional activities related to scoring strategies.

Sunday 1/9: 1:00 pm until 5 pm. 1 or 2 more hours in small groups to form our game strategy and finish with a whole group discussion to make recommendations to design-groups as to what characteristics will be desired when the selection process takes place Thursday night. Engineering and design input strongly desired at this stage. Finish the day by dividing up students and adults to form 3 or 4 design teams who will make independent proposals Thursday for selection by vets with mentor veto power. After 4 years of this, I believe strongly that teams should be encouraged to include as many scoring options as possible. They might support their proposals with pictures of mechanisms used by other teams in the past as evidence of feasibility. This may be a good time for anyone, especially adults who have veto power, to make clear certain requirements for the robot design. See my comments below for Thursday 1/13.

Monday through Wednesday 1/10 through 1/12. Teacher will provide facilities for design groups to meet at school between the hours of 3pm and 9pm as requested by the design groups. Teacher will assure that there is cardboard for modeling, graph paper, drafting software. Groups will create as detailed a proposal as possible before 6 pm on Thursday when it will be presented to vets and mentors for consideration. The proposal must explain the game playing philosophy and options supported by the physical design. The porposal must be in a form that is easy to see by the entire team either on individual copies or overhead projector or some other media viewable by all. I will need to know special needs (projector/computer/TV/etc) by Tuesday.

Thursday 1/13: The facility will be open from 3 pm on for finalizing proposals. The full team will meet at 6 for as long as necessary to decide on a direction for further development. That may be one of the 3 or 4 proposals or a hybrid. One thing that I personally will feel very strongly about, if the game resembles all others in the sense that their is head to head combat, is that the chassis and guts must be as low and compact as possible to optimize our advantage when struggling with other robots. I think this is a time when adults must gently but firmly direct the design process. I also believe we need to be respectful and constructive in our suggestions and questions when students have done their best in the horribly limited time/experience/expertise framework we've been given. Then we will select the following teams, probably: overal system/chassis, drive train, programming/electronics, specialized mechanisms, field parts, strategy?, what else?.

Thereafter we will meet every Saturday from 8:30 until 5 and Sunday 1 until 5. I will also stay one weekday (how about Wednesday, from 3 until 9). I'm also willing to extend hours and add days as necessary but will not do so if I see time wasted during regular hours. I'm hoping the engineering support will be there through 1/30 (the first 3 weeks) on a regular basis. I hope that during that time a method for checking specs and details might be worked out so that the engineers can provide less constant on site support thereafter. Our fabrication support will need to kick in by about 1/22. Aram will oversee work at GCC in communication with engrs, Mark will oversee sheet metal and laser cutting, and I believe we have the support of a local CNC machine shop owned by the brother of a parent of one of our new students. I'll bet it would be smart to select a date/time like Wednesday 1/19 at 8pm for all mentors and fabricator liaisons to be in the same place at the same time to talk about how the process unfolds smoothly.

If all goes as planned and expected we'll be finished building by Wednesday 2/16 and plenty of time to practice and debug before the prelims at Chatsworth on Sunday 2/20. Ship on Tuesday 2/22.