[mathking]

We used last year's control board (since last year's robot suffered a mortal wound at a demonstration at Ohio State late last spring) and built a "JV" robot this year. We had a large increase in the number of participants (from 28 to 50) and there would have been too many people for everyone to get a lot chances to do the actual work in building a robot. There would have been a lot of people standing around watching at any given time.

So after the design week, we had a group of the newer students start work on the second robot. They still worked on the main robot at times, but their principal work was on a second robot. We didn't design this robot to be able to compete in the competition per se (since we were using the old drill motors it would not have been legal) but rather as a learning experience and to have a demonstration robot. It has actually travelled out to elementary and middle schools to build support for the FLL program and has been out in the community for fundraisers.

One idea we followed this year was that the new members working on the second robot were mentored by the more experienced high school team members rather than our OSU engineering mentors. If you have an old pair of control boards, building a second robot does not have to be that expensive. We did buy a second chassis from IFI to use on it, but that was to test a couple of configuration ideas. We could have built the chassis out of scraps and spare parts. With buying the chassis we spent a total of $241.38 on "Minibot." (This includes the removable seat on castors it can pull, allowing it to be the Minibot Human Transporter.)