Week Two Done

Last week, kids all over the Portland Metro area rejoiced at the school cancellations/delays, but no students were happier than FIRST students. Why? Because no school means all day robotics meetings! While members of our team weren’t lucky to have our school cancelled, I know many teams who were granted this blessing. It’s just part of the FIRST spirit to wish for days off school not to go home and slack off but to do even harder work at a robotics meeting.

In other news, our team finished our prototypes! We currently have two: a two-wheel launcher and a one-wheel guided launcher. We are currently testing either and attempting to determine which will be more accurate, powerful and flexible. Our frame is being welded, our code is being written, and our website is being designed. For the first time in a while, our team is on schedule! Two weeks down, four to go.

Below is our team’s weekly video entry to FIRST (PS thanks for the flipcam Bob Goetz!)

And our Week One Summary:

Representing FIRST at a Town Hall Meeting!

Yesterday, three of our team members were given the opportunity to represent FIRST at a local town hall meeting concerning education from pre-kindergarten through college. After stressing out for hours about the idea of giving speeches in front of a bunch of adults about what FIRST means to us, we left for the meeting with the idea that it would be very formal and professional. We were all very nervous and were hastily reciting our speeches to one another on the car ride there. But to our surprise, we arrived at the meeting to discover it was nothing like any of us thought it would be. We all relaxed when we learned it was going to be a rather informal meeting and took seats at different tables around the room. Soon we began taking in groups about what we like and didn’t like about local education. It was really interested to hear the different idea and opinions (even though some people maybe had too much to say…) and it was nice to know that robotics is part of it. We all gave the group a detailed summary of FIRST robotics and talked about how extracurricular activities are just as important to high school education as primary classes.

Democratic Design

Our team has finally finished our design! The process was intense, but we think our final result is better because of it. Our idea this season was to maximize the creativity and diversity of our robot by incorporating as many designs as possible into it. First, we broke the whole team up into small design units. Each unit came up with an idea and presented it to the whole team. This way, even the quieter people can get their opinions out. We repeated this process several times, breaking into subgroups, brainstorming, then reporting to the whole team, each time more specifically designing our robot. This method has allowed us to cover as many different possibilities as possible while still developing rapidly (our design was completed in five days, which is faster than it usually is). Also, we posted a youtube video that already has four thousand views!

Week One = Over!

Phew, that was a long week. Only five to go! Team Pandamonium’s first week in build season was great. We’ve successfully come up with designs for our robot AND website, begun writing our drive code, finished CADing our frame, built our launching mechanism prototype and gotten 4000+ views on our youtube channel. Four thousand views in four days of only our team, that just goes to show the vibrancy of the FIRST community. We are much more ahead of schedule than we usually are, which is exciting. We are already looking forward to the regionals, which will be better than ever!

Kickoff!!!

Today was kickoff, the greatest day ever!!! It was pretty much a twelve hour day for everyone, starting at five in the morning. All the best days start that way, and today was no exception. Our team listened to speeches by the wily Woody Flowers, calm and collected Dean Kamen, and even Stephen Colbert, George Bush and Bill Clinton. It was quite a surprise to hear people we see on TV in such a nerdy convention, but I guess that’s what Dean Kamen had in mind when he said he would make robotics cool. Everyone was super tense for the announcement of this year’s challenge, half our team was going crazy. Or maybe that was just our bodies’ physical reaction to the realization that we’d probably be getting between two and three hours of a sleep a week for the next month and half. No matter. On the ride home, all we could do was talk about all the things our robot is going to do. I’d guess that around 20% of these ideas will come to fruition, but that’s still amazing. This year’s kickoff was the best it has ever been, not only because of the amazing speeches and challenge, but also because it will be the last kickoff for a good portion of our team. FIRST has been an incredible inspiration to my friends and myself, and today is the inauguration of the last season many Pandamonium members will get to compete in. But today isn’t the end of our journey through the world of FIRST, it isn’t even the beginning. There are schools that have never heard of FIRST and students who still need to be reached! The quest is nowhere near done, and the graduates of Pandamonium 2915 will never rest until it is achieved! Go Teams!

Two Days….Or Two Millenia?!?!!

It’s only two days away from kickoff and our entire team is excited! We have high hopes for this season. We are meeting every single day of the week after kickoff so as to get a jump on the season. Our team has five seniors on it currently, which is more than we have ever had, so we want to go out with style. We’ve completely changed our design process for this year as well. We’ll be breaking up into small groups, that way every single person on the team has a say in the final robot design, not just seniors or builders. We hope that this will give us a much better design, which is something we really want to capitalize on this year. We are all looking forward to this season…from the hectic build season to the chaotic Regionals and maybe even Championships.

Leaving Lifetime Mementos in the Garden of Memory

More volunteering…will it ever stop? But of course not! Seven Members of the team went and helped out at Portland Memory Garden. Members of our team did different things from picking up trash, planting daffodils, cleaning graffiti, raking the leaves, clearing blackberry bushes, and trimming bushes. The Portland Memory Garden is a public garden designed specifically for those who have memory disorders (Like Alzheimer’s disease). The garden is located in Portland, Oregon off of SE Powell at 104th Ave. in the SE corner of Ed Benedict Park. May 2002, was when it was dedicated. It is one out of eight memory gardens located in the U.S. and one of the two that is on public land. The garden contains four seasons of flowers and plants to spark and stimulate the sense of past memories. It is open all year long (8:00 am to dusk) and it is free of charge. The Portland Memory Garden is a place that is for families and those who wish to visit, enjoy, and to be restored.

More Refereeing!

What a busy weekend! Over the past three days members of our team have given over 50 hours refereeing at the FLL tournament at Mentor Graphics. The facility is great, and all the teams were amazing. We were shocked by how many teams did so well this year. You can check out photos from this event here (add link to the FLL Mentor Graphics album). Our thanks go out to Mentor Graphics for donating use of their campus for the past nine year. Members of our team may graduate and stop being able to compete, but we will always be able to come back and referee at competitions like this.

FLL Refereeing!

FLL refereeing! Three members of our team volunteered at the Intel FLL tournament today. For those that don’t know, FLL is a mini version of FRC designed for middle to junior high school students. Robots are designed out of Legos and built to accomplish a certain amount of tasks on a small board. This was a great experience, and reminded us all of our past experiences on FLL teams. Our thanks go out to Intel, who let FLL use their campus to host the tournament. We’re all looking forward to the next tournament.

Volunteering!

Our teammates have been volunteering at places including the Blanchet House. With their mission being to “feed, clothe, and offer shelter and aid those in need,” the Blanchet House of Hospitality serves more than 800 free meals per day, and while there, our team members helped prepare, plate and serve meals, or help with cleaning up.