There was a fair amount of driving control practice between programming iterations but little design modifications. (It was hard to add pieces to a moving robot.) At the end we discussed how we might do this differently on Wednesday and committed to rotating through design, programming, and driver control stations to give everyone a chance.
The team members also can work on becoming familiar with the programming software and a CAD based design software from home. The team members should be able to save their programs to the cloud if they sign in with their EBLS student accounts and the CAD software is free with registration.
- Programming: http://www.modkit.com/vex
- Design: http://www.vexrobotics.com/vexiq/software/vexassembler
I think that it's valuable to spend a good amount of time in the Think stage of the Think-Do-Test cycle. Even without a robot to or computer to use a lot of valuable brainstorming can be done while working on chores or doodling on a piece of paper.
Yesterday one of the T/Th team members gave me some feedback that they thought Modkit was slow, that it took forever to load a saved file so I spent some time in it last night to see how it loads up at the school today. Sometimes the save action failed but if I was persistent I could get it to save. I'll post back later with how the load works today.
ReplyDeleteLoading up saved projects seems to be fine for me, but I didn't have time to try loading it at school. One of the M/W team members was loading files, but one of the times they tried loading it failed. Since it didn't work in two attempts, waiting oh, 30 seconds each time, they decided to just write a new program.
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