Whats in the interview room

[Tim Arnold]

Originally Posted by technoL

At the Florida Regional there was only a table for the judges, and then four chairs in front of the table for us to present. There were also chairs around the sides of the room.

As we had a PowerPoint and video go go along with our presentation, we placed everything except for the laptop in a usable state into a small box (we had no idea what would be in there). When we entered the room, we quickly realized the conditions would be less than optimal. We made a table for the box out of chairs and quickly ran an extension cord (taking around 30 precious seconds). We showed our video, and attempted to switch to the PowerPoint presentation (by manually switching video cables) and realized there was a problem when nothing came up on the projector. Our first student to speak began immediately to cover while we fixed the PowerPoint (turns out when you close the lid of our laptop, even with sleep disabled, it disables the external monitor). In the middle of the second student's presentation we got it working and just wrapped up with it.

Questions asked included our unorthodox outreach using geocaching and entering a local parade with our 2006 robot dressed up as a snowman (and shooting snowballs). They had more questions they wanted to ask but ran out of time. We brought a 3-ring binder with documentation of our activities and asked for them to keep it, but they denied stating that they would be afraid they might loose it and just to hold onto it in the pit (where they would, and did, later visit). As we exited the room we noticed various trinkets that other teams left as a memoir, or perhaps a bribe , but we did not have anything on us for them.

Moral of the story: Follow KISS, even though its not a robot. While presentations are nice, be sure not to rely on it and have a backup method ready if it is critical!