The Unknown does rounds

At today's meeting with the Monday/Wednesday team I got some good news. They had all agreed on a team name, they are The Unknown. I don't know what they mean by it, but they like it better than all of the other suggestions they've made. We also talked about ideas for an engineering notebook and as I suspected they were all pretty set on having a VEX Robotics Engineering Notebook just like the other team. It was worth making sure. I'll order one so it will hopefully arrive by their next meeting in a couple of weeks.

Since everyone had felt strongly about not specializing, about everyone having a chance to do everything, I outlined a rotation schedule where two people would work on robot design, two on programming, and one on driving practice. I space out those who were comfortable with programming so that they would be working with others when it was their turn at the programming station. I also gave a brief overview of the Modkit (MIT Scratch-like) programming language. Almost half of our meeting was gone by that time so we only had time for five minute rotations.

The system worked out well as far as staying on task and not getting bored. Drivers stayed on task for the full five minutes and would have kept driving for longer if they were allowed to. The design group, without a robot to Do and Test on flew through a couple sketches each in their 10 minutes at the design station and needed the most attention to keep their focus. Perhaps if they had built partial components they could handle a longer time.

At the programming station people barely got their feet wet, it wasn't enough time to build something functional and the robot was busy driving so they wouldn't have been able to download to it anyway. They hardly touched their worksheet for the think stage. They could easily use more time and now that they all have had a taste of it, we will use both computers at that station next time.

We did a brief review of how things went and they were all enthusiastic about feeling like they had gotten a lot done. We won't meet until the 5th of January, but when we do they are suppose to talk about their STEM project and not get on the computers or get out the robot until I get there and then we will try to have time for 10 minute rotations. I asked if they wanted to keep doing everything or do specializations and the few who understood what that was were all for specializing. I think we need to try this way another couple of times before making that decision.

Some parents have offered to host get-togethers over the holiday. I hope they work out for a little more time together and some team building.