Suit Bots

The Say Watt? Robotics FTC teams, who are from New Jersey, recently attended the Russian National Championship in Moscow.  After hearing about this, we sent them email asking how they got their teachers to allow this and how they fund raised for this, and this is what they said:

Hi Fletcher,

I am the coach of Say Watt Robotics.   We are independent of any school, so we definitely had to work.   There were some kids who were not able to make the trip because of mid-terms and missing too much school.   However, we scheduled the trip so they only missed two days of school (we left at noon on Wednesday, so it counts as attending the full day).   All of the parents had to write notes to the school saying that the kids were going to miss those two days.    We also worked with one of the schools so that the kids finished their mid-terms on Wednesday at 11:30, just before we pulled them out to go to the airport.   For this and for World’s, we tell the teachers well in advance.   We minimize the missed school days and the kids have to do the work they miss. Most of the teachers are excited about the team and want to see the kids succeed.

I also write letters to the schools about individual students telling the school that a particular person is critical to the team and that we are going to be competing.

It is not perfect, and sometimes it affects grades negatively, but it is the best we can do.

With respect to funding, we have corporate sponsors and we use some of that money to pay for generic travel expenses, but the kids have to pay many of the travel costs themselves.  Because we are not school-based, many of the parents accompany the team on its trips.   The parents also spend a lot of time trying to arrange the best deals possible for travel.

Regards,

Jim Carr

Coach 3539, 4311, and 5169.

 

This is useful information, and perhaps we can use it in the future to plan a large scale tour of our own.

After our recent qualification for the San Diego regional championship, we felt that we ought to get some outside help so that we could qualify for world championships.

We asked ourselves, “Who would know about qualifying for worlds?”  Of course, the obvious answer would be the winners of the Inspire award from the previous season, but would they talk to a small team like ours?  They did!

We sent the Landroids a message asking for tips on making our engineering notebook better, and here is what they said:

Hi Fletcher/Suit Bots,

Your website blog is probably one of the best we have seen in years.  Our team doesn’t have time to blog anymore, so our website is in a standstill, but yours have constant new content and reflections, documenting your team’s activities diligently. Very nice!

Printing out the blog pages is very similar to doing an electronic engineering notebook. However, engineering notebook is different from a team journal.  While the notebook can include team’s journal, activities and achievements, a big part of it should be in the engineering designs.  You do have those sketches and video blogs that shows your design process nicely, but the hyperlinks would not be active in the paper copy, which is a major disadvantage to overcome.

While our team might enjoy reading your blogs, the judges really don’t have time to read a long journal entries during the judging session. They flip through the pages quickly, look for the photos that will catch their eyes on your designs.  Tagging the most important entries and add a table of content will help leading them to locate those pages you want them to look at first. Keep the paragraphs short, always have captions below the photos to explain what they are about will help them understand the content quickly.

Another way to see the effectiveness of your engineering notebook is ask yourself these questions:

1.       If there is a potential to patent your design, is the information in the notebook clearly documented the proprietary data?

2.       If someone needs to reconstruct a part of the robot, can that person look at your notebook and be able to recreate what you have made?

3.       If you see another team has a same/similar design, can you pinpoint it in your engineering notebook that your team had perhaps developed this idea first?  (Always happened to our team).

Landroids kept our engineering notebook from the last 5 years (since our FLL days), those were the 3 main reasons why we need to go back to our engineering notebooks constantly.  It is not for the judging award, it is more for our internal design record and patent applications.

Overall, we are very impressed with what your team have done. Keep up the good work, we will see you at the Worlds!

Pearl

 

Clearly, there is some flattery in this email, but it will be extremely helpful for making our notebook better.