As a coach, this year, I felt a lot more pressure than last year as a parent volunteer. My team was wonderful, and worked hard!
I spent lots of time at their school, finding an unused corner (which was really tricky this year, since they have 2 new classes and a whole new grade level in the building!) so that I could learn how to use program the robot.
The weekend of the Saturday practice, I was lucky enough to bring the robot home, and Grace and I spent hours programming various tasks. Sadly, we found out that all of our code had to be reworked, because our robot was sticking out over the edge. ::cries::
So, I probably logged 18 hours with the robot that weekend, redoing all the code that worked 100% of the time, to get code that only worked 50% of the time. It was stressful and tiring, and I just needed more time.
When I had finally had enough, William got to play with the robot, since he was not on the coding part of his robotics team. He played until the robot died (from being used all day.)
The block coding is so cool, and way better than having to type each function!
Our attachments were easy to remove, to help cut down on time between missions.
We got our shirts the Friday before competition. Luckily, I was working that day, and was able to grab the shirts from one of the coaches, to iron on our team logo!
The internet had some cute ideas for 'lego' themed food. The watermelon idea was adorable, but the tiny pieces were so time consuming! I tried it ahead of time, so see if I really wanted to commit to such and undertaking.
The day before competition saw the kitchen filling with lego-like food!
I had to use a spice jar to fit the circles on the bread!
Grace helped me make the brownies. They were the first things gone at the snack table!
Our schedule
The little robot that could!
My team!
Waiting to be called up to the tables.
During the competition!
Going to our judging time! Coaches aren't allowed to speak at all during this, and it's hard to not prompt them, when you know they know the answer to one of the judges' questions! But they did a really good job, and were polite and didn't interrupt one another.
"Submerged" tables:
Our team won second place for robot design, which was a total shock, because so many of the teams had cool setups! The team was happy to win! One of the other Dimondale teams took first, so our school made a clean sweep of the category!
J-G
Each team member gets to bring home the trophy for a day, and since Grace and Juliet are actually two people, I had a day in between to cut and vinyl the trophy before it was added to the trophy case.
I also printed a picture for posterity. The new school will probably have a fancy trophy case, but we won't be seeing it very often!
No comments:
Post a Comment