Our district and custodians in advance of the predictions, have cancelled our Saturday meeting. Fair enough. This is what the local news is calling for
The rain will change back over to snow by 2 a.m. Saturday morning. Despite the rain, it’s still possible that Metro Detroit could receive anywhere from 2-6 inches of snow as more snow builds in before sunrise Saturday.
I get it. But it’s one week after kickoff, we have slack, what can we do Remote. How do you coordinate CAD? What are ways Code can participate remotely without a bot to test on? I do know some of the answers but this is more for the whole community.
How does your team handle snowdays and if you do remote work on those days what does each subteam do to be useful?
Code: Simulations, XRC? I’m not familiar with it but heard it mentioned, Autodesk Synthesis claims to have it?
CAD: we use Fusion 360 but students have a team they can share files with and see what people are working on
Business: Canva, Slack, Google Drive
Media: Editing backlog of videos on the media laptop they take home
Etc.
Build and Electrical feel like the people who are left out most of the time.
Our snow day plan has always been “Take the excuse to rest and spend time with your families. Stay safe.” If necessary, we make up the time on a typical non-work day–but usually we don’t, because burnout is a thing and gift horses and mouths and whatnot.
This thread got me to actually look at our forecast this weekend - 7 to 16 inches through Saturday. If that actually happens (and dramatic forecasts often fall short) things will finally start to look like a normal winter - seriously we should have like 2 ft of snow depth right now compared to last year and it’s more like 2-3 inches.
There’s definitely a ton of things that can be done in general when students aren’t meeting in person.
Programming can run and test their code via simulations (it’s also especially helpful to do it with AdvatangeScope). Although it’s near the end of week 1 and there likely aren’t any finalized mechanisms yet, it’s still helpful to verify functionality of basic things like driving, vision, localization, etc.
Mechanical/design teams can work on a “final” CAD for the robot. Our team is planning to spend this weekend doing an in-team “Cadathon” so we can come back into week 2 with an understanding of what to manufacture. Generally, it’s best to reserve in-person meeting time to work with materials and machines and save things that can be done virtually (like CAD) for outside of meetings.
Aside from that though, you should try to see if your school can let you guys meet on a Sunday or something to make up for lost time.
In the first four days of build season this year we lost our Sunday and Tuesday meetings to snow.
We try to honor snow days as best we can by taking the night off. Some exceptions.
Early in the season we will have Zoom calls (like this week). We try to keep them to 50% of the scheduled in-person meeting time. Sunday we did 2x two hour calls with a 3 hour break in between instead of meeting for 7 hours at the shop.
If we have a lot of parts to make we may have a group meet at the offsite shop to make parts.
This last one we’d like to move away from. Give the kids the day. Let them come back rested and more focused for the next meeting. Its also not smart to be encouraging anyone to drive in bad weather, even if it is their parent who is making the drive. Just don’t.
In our worst year for snowfall we lost over a week to snow, but we’ve found it’s really hard to make full remote meetings productive after the earlier weeks of build season when its decision making time.
We’re having a “rain day” cancel optional practice today, but it’s really only affecting field build as we use Onshape for CAD at home and generally are able to coordinate well, though we are fairly small so each member usually has things to do by themselves or is able to take a break.
For our team, mentor to student communication cannot occur on a video call unless a team teacher is on, and this was only done during Covid. We do not have a team wide slack or discord either.
We primarily email subteam lists for communication.
We have a team drive in which we create agendas and assign tasks to students.
Onshape helps us coordinate CAD work, but that is also difficult when you can’t speak to a student while you’re in the same document. This leads to mentors filling the gaps during snow days on the CAD side, and students focusing on items like software.
Our kids often also take home our electrical packouts and the robot being worked on so they can wire at home. Planning ahead is the challenge.
We just make it work. At the end of the day you can only stress out so much if you fall behind. We usually try to ask our teachers for make up days when snowdays occur.
I’m 34 and I have only maybe felt one once, we don’t get them anywhere in the valley of California really. If we did feel it in the valley it means a lot of someones near the coast or in the mountains is having a bad day.
We do not meet on campus for snow days. For us “Snow” day s is very variable. From blue sky and no precipitation to random patches of black ice and wet snow. So each event is different. We don’t mandate meetings but students are free to do what they want. If they choose to meet off campus they can. Or collaborate virtually.
