Question of the Week!!! (5/24/04)

[KathieK]

My personal goal this year was to communicate the details of the season back to the students, parents, and sponsors via a newsletter and e-mails and meeting minutes. I found it frustrating when e-mail systems bounced my e-mail as "spam", when people kept changing their addresses and when people stopped reading the e-mails...but then asked the same questions that were already answered in the e-mails!

[Steve W]

I think it might have been getting the team to understand urgency.There always seems to be the thought that we have lots of time. If we were rookies I would understand. We had problems with this last year and things did not improve much this year. The other issue was Chairmans Award. The team felt that they couldn't win so why bother. It came to a point were I lost it (not the best thing to do when trying to set an example) and started yelling. For some reason I couldn't get them to understand that you can learn alot about yourselves and your direction by doing the Chairmans. Cooler heads prevailed eventually and the submission was made. I am not sure if they learned anything (hey guys let me know) but it should make it easier next year to get done.

Personally time management was an issue. Work, robotics and family are tough to balance. Family took the worse part followed by work. Boy when I finished I had a lot of make up to do (still do). Still I would find it difficult to give up.

[Lisa Perez]

This year Team 573 was left without a team to go to, so the Juggernauts took us in. It was hard for us to gel together as one team at first - considering the differences in ideologies and the ways both teams work. Differences aside some weeks after, we did come together as a team, and that made the FIRST season a very enjoyable experience.

[Joe3]

The most dificult aspect of this season for me was the transition from Pit Crew to Competition team. On our team, we have set people who are chosen to be on each, and they are mutually exclusive. In the past, I had always been on pit crew, and I really enjoyed the challanges that it offered. From rebuilding a 10' wing in 20 mins on MOEhawk in 2002 to the constant rapid maintenance of GeroniMOE to keep it stacking, there was a continuous flow of challanges that offered themselves to be completed. This year, however, I expressed my interest in Competition Team. The past year, I had disagreed with many of the on-field decisions made by the comp team, so I decided that "well, of course I can do better than that", so I wanted to be on Comp team. As fate would have it, I passed all of the requirements and was selected to be the arm, kilt, and everything else but wheels driver. This, too I enjoyed, along with the immense amount of stress and pressure it carried with it. The experiance also gave me another perspective on how difficult it is to make strategy decisions on the fly, and make the robot do exactly what you want it to do. Although...while I have a greater appreciation as to why all those "other" MOE drivers made the decisions they did, I still think they were wrong /sarcasm