Our Skit

We presented our innovative solution to project judges at the Saturday 12/12/15 Wisconsin Sectional Competition in Mukwanogo.

The setting for our skit takes place on Sesame Street with Oscar the Grouch as the central character. We present our idea to introduce a new character to the Sesame Street cast, Recycle Bin Benny, who would teach children on a daily basis about recycling.

Before our Regional tournament, we conducted research which showed that adding Benny's image to the common 3-arrow recycle logo would help children recognize what items may be recycled, and in which bin to put the items.

The outstanding results from our study helped us to win the Research Award at the Sectional competition!
You can still help us with our survey research before we compete at State too! Check out our survey post for more details.

You may notice our team's unique presentation style. The judges have a rubric to fill out and we like to help them by formatting our skit around the rubric! We go right down the line, starting with the problem identification, through innovative solution and effectiveness.

With this efficient layout, the judges are able to circle every section of their sheet by the time our five minute skit is finished. This presentation style has worked amazingly well for several years and the judges like it too!

Enjoy our video!

Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

3 Missions, 696 Points

Finally we have videos uploaded of all three of our main missions! We have a couple more backup missions for if something goes wrong with our main three.

We are working on many updates and improvements to our missions, but these videos should give you a good idea of how we are doing so far.  :)

If all goes as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.

MISSION 1 - 113 Points

MISSION 2 - 287 Points

MISSION 3 - 260 Points

Sectionals! :D

Sectionals was awesome! Our pit table was right between two teams we've made friends with over the years, Franklin Storm and Leedle Bots. Right from the start of the day, our pit table was swamped with teams and coaches studying our impressive programming code. They had so much to say about our programming, project, and core values booklets that we had out at our table. That was pretty cool. We didn't even have our pit boards up yet since we needed them packed and ready to go for interviews!

We spent the morning rehearsing our skit and prepping for interviews. We were one of the last teams to go through the judging tracks. We really appreciated the extra time in the morning. Our interviews went really well! We headed back to the pits smiling and feeling more confident about the day.

We had some issues that weren't our fault during the robot matches in the afternoon. It was especially nerve wracking when they started the match before we were ready and they were still resetting our field! We lost time because of that. A couple other things happened too, but we still pulled through. Our robot, Benny Hopper, performed fairly well for us. In the end our highest score was 430 points, giving us the rank of 14th place out of 48 teams.

Finally it was time for the awards ceremony...
We won the 1st place research award!!!
Not only that, but we were also nominated for more awards than any other team! That was special and made us smile from ear to ear. We were also up for champions and got nominated for it in the awards ceremony! When announcing which 18 teams will move on to state, we were the first listed! So...
We are going to state!

Our excitement level is through the roof! Many of the teams we made friends with will move on too!

To continue our tradition, we met together as a team for dinner at Culver's and held our own in-team awards ceremony with special awards for each team member.

What an excellent finish to the many weeks of hard work and dedication. Now we plan to take a break over Christmas and New Years and meet back together after the holidays to prepare for state. We are looking forward to seeing some of our favorite teams there too!

A TEAM Meeting

Kenneth created a fast, smooth, and accurate line follower. That inspired Peyton to learn how to do the same thing for mission 3. He already had the mission completed, but it will definitely be more accurate and repeatable if it follows a line, too. 

Kenneth always does an amazing job with peer mentoring.

We always have fun with team building exercises. At this meeting we really did some team building and exercise! ;)

Not quite enough teammates for
a pyramid, so we made a cube. 

After making our cube,
we decided to build a tower.

Who knew cheer leading stunts were a part of robotics meetings?

Mission 3 - 280 Points

Today was another programming success! We got our mission 3 working consistently. If we calculated correctly, this mission scores us 280 points! If all three of our missions go as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.

We still want to improve this run by adding a bag collector for the sorter area which would increase our score by 40 points. We're also talking about dropping off a compost collector in our second mission that we would pick up in this third mission. But we're happy with what we have and want to take things one step at a time.

We sped the program up a bit after videoing it, so as it is currently, this run takes about 28 seconds to complete.

          Take a look:

Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

Fieldtrip

We visited Keep Greater Milwaukee Beautiful! It's a waste management facility. We got to learn and see so many cool things!

We participated in a live educational demonstration

All suited up to tour the trash and recycling sorting area!