On January 21st, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the team held an open house where we hosted our sponsors as well as AGR employees. We organized the event so that our sponsors could keep up with our activities in real-time and get a closer look at our workplace.

The team worked on projects while people were here and we displayed and informed them about what we were doing. Having employees there was very helpful because we were able to get their feedback and opinions on our plans and ideas to see things from another view. Additionally, we provided snacks and videos for the employees and sponsors.

Mechanical, Build, and Strategy

We made our own gamepiece of the “rocket ship” from the game (Destination: Deep Space). A few of our team members and mentors put it together so that we would be able to use it for practicing purposes. It is a very accurate replica that is made out of plywood. The height of the rocket is approximately 10 feet. This can be seen in the photo below.

The team has been making the finalizations of the robot design (we can of course still make more modifications) and holding group meetings each night. This is so that everyone is fully aware and acknowledged of what we will are doing with the robot and is able to participate. The benefits of our group meetings have been that everyone has the opportunity to get involved as well as encouraged to be a contributing part of our robot.

The previously mentioned prototypes that we have been working on from the last blog have been narrowed down to one final design, we went with Figure #1. A mentor and some of our students made a CAD model of the design and thought of ways to improve it.

Our members have also been working hard on the lift for our robot. So far, we have assembled several pieces of maytec together using a blueprint that our team created. The main parts of it are together but we still have other sections to complete (attaching it to the robot, adding motors, etc).

Awards

Our finance committee members have been working on the Entrepreneurship award. We have been trying to refer to our previous submissions and update them with more accurate, up-to-date, and better data with the added challenge this year of having condensed work: 3 pages. This will be a hard obstacle for teams to get through since some of them are used to having very long business plans that are up to 30 or so pages.

The Chairman’s essay is almost complete. We have a few edits, adaptations, and changes to add but the draft is really strong. We based our essay off of a strong outline that used a new method which we haven’t used before. Instead of just titles of the locations things will go in our outline, we included all of our facts and data in order in a bullet point format with several indents. It has been serving to be incredibly useful making it this way and making the writing process much faster and more efficient. The picture below helps explain the format.