Monday, January 18, 2016

Our Mentors Disappeared!?

Today's meeting kicked off with a sign on the door saying, "What would you do if your coaches and mentors disappeared for one meeting? Hmm...". A judge had asked us that question at our sectional tournament. So our coaches were inspired to find out!

So we ran our meeting all by ourselves for two hours. We did really well too! We started out by setting goals for the meeting. Then we practiced our skit a couple times. Next we created and completed our own teamwork exercises. After that we broke into two sub-teams. One worked on building attachments and rethinking some programming and strategy. For inspiration, the other group did research on how other teams accomplish certain robot tasks. Finally we met back together to see what we could do with everything we had learned.

When our coaches joined us for the end of the meeting, we discussed what we learned. It was really cool to see what we were capable of on our own. It really gave us a good sense of teamwork and leadership and better feel for what the role of the coach means to us. Actually, it was so fun, we talked of possibly trying it again sometime!

After dinner, some of the team stayed extra and worked further on attatchment designs and strategy for our robot. We also began testing our gyro sensors to see how consistent and accurate we can get them and which one of the two we own works best.

It was a neat meeting that was productive and gave us new experiences in a fun way!