Week 3: September 22

After the high emotions at the last meeting, I was prepared for this meeting to be a challenge.

Well, kids will always surprise you. They all walked in as if nothing untoward had happened at the last meeting. They quickly reached agreement on their robot base, and there are no hard feelings at all. Actually, they told me they had reached this agreement at the end of the last meeting - somehow I must have missed it during all the shouting and name-calling!

They have developed their own design, a basic chassis with two drive wheels and a slider. It should travel reasonably straight, turn easily, and can drive forward or backward with places for attachments on both front and back.

The next step is to start working on the missions, which were released just a few days ago. As we predicted, there are several missions which require delivering items, as opposed to last year where there were several retrievables. First I showed the team a video from the High Tech Kids website which showed several innovative approaches to solving the retrievables missions from Ocean Odyssey (http://www.hightechkids.org/?2-1-1054#FLL_Strategy_Videos). Since all our team members had competed in Ocean Odyssey, they were able to appreciate the variety of solutions and it really got them in the right mood for brainstorming.

Next, we reviewed the NanoQuest missions. They wanted to look at the Cable Tester (truck) and the Stuck Nanotip first, so they broke into pairs with the goal of brainstorming at least five approaches to each mission.

They still had trouble working together, however. Being all in one room, they managed to get in each others' way constantly, and spent a lot of time listening in on each others' discussions. It took considerable persuasion to get them on track again. How would they have managed if there were more kids on the team?

By the end of the meeting, they had several ideas for most missions and at least two for every mission except the Individual Atoms.