Food for Thought: MON JAN 9

First things first - Check out this AWESOME prototype of a ball collector by team 360 that they built in 2004. I've listed the website I stole this from below.

So y’all! I don’t think I’ll be able to meet with you tomorrow from 5:00 – 8:00 pm. My plan this week is to meet with you at least on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday.

Here are a few things you can definitely work on:

** Make sure everyone is plugged into the build blog and can use it. Kersten, I want to make sure we figure out that posting problem for you (eeek!).

** Mr. Rockman will give you two bound and printed copies of the FULL 2006 FRC manual (it’s the fat one). Please at least skim through it. I expect one of you to be snuggling up to it as bedtime reading, familiarizing with the rules. That’s what I’m doing tonight. Take turns borrowing the manual (I don’t want to kill too many trees).

** Gather materials to build field elements: We need to build at least the hoop with the light on top of it if we want to be able to shoot through it. It’s angled funny. You’ll find LARGE printed sheets at the back of MANUAL with all the diagrams. Figure out what you need to buy from Home Depot or Ace to build them – here’s a partial material list: http://www2.usfirst.org/2006comp/AdvanceBuy_2006_r4.pdf. I would be awesome if you can get a teacher or parent to pick up the materials so that we can work on building the game pieces on Thursday night (6-8 pm) @ IDEO.

** And of COURSE! BRAINSTORMING!! Get a pile of computer paper and start drawing lots of stuff! Think about Ball Herding separate from Ball Launching.

Also, Tania had a really good suggestion of looking up stuff that exists in the world already that would be inspirational. Check out these sites:

Ball Launcher Advice: Click here

What a National Championship Team did a few years ago:
http://teamster.usc.edu/~fixture/Robotics/2004Build.htm

Cool Prototypes of Ball Collector (see above) and FRC robot:
http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/200004/first.html

A class I did at Stanford that required shooting stuff out:
http://design.stanford.edu/spdl/EE118/YellowJacket/report_toc.html

And a LOT LOT MORE on the web!!

Good luck! See you on Tuesday! - Emily