As planned, we did 10 minute rotations on the rounds today. Not as planned, we ran into technical difficulties at the programming station. First the VEX IQ brain wouldn't connect to the computer. Then we had trouble logging into or switching between accounts at modkit.com. These troubles were further increased by the main computer we normally use having it's dock bar out of whack, occasional "new com port" messages we couldn't resolve without rebooting, and the error message from Google saying that Modkit is using a deprecated authentication method. All this combined caused us to loose ten minutes and loose a rotation.
At the end we talked about specialization. The team members have been more enthusiastic of the idea each meeting, but they are unwilling to give up a turn driving the robot at the events. I'm running out of ideas on how to give all five team members equal driving practice time in a 60 minute meeting and yet give the programming and robot design stations enough time to make some progress. I suggested they discuss the idea of specialization with each other at school the next day.
On the brighter side, the EBLS order for some additional stuff we've been looking forward has arrived! They purchased a full highrise field element set so we can do full practice with the setup as it is at competitions. They also added sensors to the first ("A") kit so that it has the same as the second ("1") kit, four motors to bring each team up to six total, extra axels the "1" team requested for their design, a color sensor (maybe the "1" team had ordered that a while ago), an engineering notebook for the "A" team, individual graph paper composition design notebooks for each team member and spares of a few components.
Thank you very much to our host/sponsor Edith Bowen Laboratory School.
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