Quote:
Originally posted by Gui Cavalcanti
How often do you guys meet during build season? For how long? How long do you design for? Do you build a prototype? Does the whole team get to see kickoff? Is there some big kickoff meeting that everyone gets together for? Where do you build? Do you organize your meetings around your engineer's schedule? Are there subsections on your team (arm team, claw team, drivetrain team, electrical team), or does the team handle all of it?
Also, a couple of other things unrelated to scheduling...
Does everyone on the team automatically get to go to Regionals and Nationals? Is there a selection process? How do you determine who is driver, secondary, human player?
Thanks!
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Wow! Lots of questions! First of all, congrats on your nomination, and good luck! Second - We meet every day during the build. Our schedule: Monday-Thursday, 5-9ish. School ends at 3:10 - after school, we can stay in the tech center and work on our homework and get something to eat if no one is bringing food in. Friday we meet from 5-10ish. Saturday we meet from 8am-9pm. That changes depending how late it is during the build. At the beginning we usually don't have our materials and stuff so we'll go home around 5. On Sunday we meet from 1-8 or 9. That's our unofficial schedule... But it's very rare that we stick to it. Usually we stay later or go home earlier, again, depending how late it is in the build. For dinner we have parents sign up on a schedule so we don't have to worry about going home everynight for food or buying it from JDs (a hamburger place down the street). M-F, parents bring dinner. Saturday we get lunch and dinner and Sunday we get dinner. If there is a night no one has signed up for, then it's an "fend for yourself day" where you are responsible for your own food. Thursdays are pizza night (we get a discount from Little Caesars) and once in a while we have JDs night, where JD gives us something close to 50% off of our food. Ok, onto the second question
We usually do build a prototype. This year, we used TOBOR II as our prototype for TOBOR V by replacing T2's drill motor drive with what would be T5's drive (atwoods).
The whole team gets to see the kickoff. We send a few reps. to a kickoff (usually Kokomo) and the reest of us huddle around a TV in the tech center, anxioulsy awaiting the satellite broadcast.
We build in our tech center at school. There is a big room, 1/2 is a computer lab and 1/2 has tables. The CAD/aniumation guys work in the computer half and the actual building is done in the half with all the tables. There is 'the back room' where we store all of our materials and stuff. Across the hall from the tech center is a metal shop and a wood shop where we can machine parts and build prototypes. Down the hall from the machine shop is the auto shop which is good for testing how the robot runs. Then next to the wood shop is a graphic arts room where we print our team t-shirts. If we can't machine a part in our metal shop, we go to Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) and use the machine shop(s) there. We are
very lucky to have all the facilities we do!!
Our engineers are awesome. Many of them come every night. They get off of work and come straight to East. There even there most Saturdays at 8. They rock. We don't start our meeting til 5 so the engineers (who work and live 15-20 minutes away) san be there at the start of the meeting. Usually we get started a little later (around 5:30) so mostly everyone can be there. Our engineers rule.
We have seperate subteams to work on different parts of the robot. This year there we had; drive, grabber, caster/brake, electrical, machining, CAD/Inventor, animation, Chairman's... I think that's all. During the design stage, one electrical person went to work with the grabber team, one went on the drive team and the other kind of wandered. The CAD people also worked with grabber/drive at the beginning, before they had anything to model up.
Everyone on the team aautomatically gets to go to regionals. But if you want to go to nationals, you'd better have worked hard during the build! We have 30 students on the team (we originally started with 35) and onlt 19 of those students got to go to nationals this year. Last year, almost everyone on the team went (31 people), which was a disaster... the advisors wanted between 15-20 students to go. It turns out that those numbers were excellent. Everyone had something to do at nationals, no one was sitting around doing nothing. It worked out really well. There isn't really a *set* selection process for who gets to go. Basically, if you worked hard and deserve to go, then you'll go.
To choose our driver and human player we held driver tryouts before kickoff. The human player tryouts consisted of trowing floppies into the basket of TOBOR II (for accuracy). The driver tryout was driving TOBOR III to pick up balls. Drivers had to listen to the coach talking in their ear as to which ball to pick up. There was a scoring system for both and whoever scored the highest won. That's about it. Oh, for our driver/controller... there were 6 people who tried out. Two of the guys tied for first. One decided he wanted to be on the pit crew, rather than drive so the other first place driver (Joey) was our driver this year. The third place driver was to be our controller... he ended up being the human player. So our fourth place driver was to be the controller... he quit. Then the fifth place driver was to be the controller... he quit because he went to another school and couldn't make meetings. So the sixth place driver wound up being our controller (Dave Belling - the kid who won the $20,000 from MTU!!) and did an *awesome* job!
Wow. My fingers hurt. I think I'm going to go soak them in ice water now!
Hope this helped!
- Katie
Oh, one last thing: Our team is student-run. There are no *set* leaders. No one is *elected*, people just step up and assume the role of leader... but it is never officially said "Oh, so-and-so is the leader of this group". This works for our team... but I know some teams that have democracies in place where they vote for who leads which subteam and so on. Do whatever works for your team. We trid the whold democracy, advisors-pick-the-leader-of-each-subteam thing last year, and it DID NOT work for us. But it might for your team. It's up to you how you run it! Good luck!!