Mission 7…Complete

I’ve been lax in blogging, but as I’ve said, I don’t blog. And I like my fans (or fan?) wanting more.

Every week heading into our meeting, I wonder “How are we going to be ready for the Qualifier?” Then the girls amaze me and I feel great! And I feel greater today than I have so far in this journey. We got a lot done in our meeting this week!

The Business Team – Their goal is to set up our sponsors, plan our ‘pit’, get our shirts designed and printed, and make sure we have the money to do it!. Towards our $1000 goal, we have a great sponsor in Maplewood’s Freeman’s Fish Market. Thank you Reggie! We have other sponsors expected to come in this week to get our fundraising to between $500-$800. An amazing job. More amazing because these ladies did it all!

Community Project – We made a lot of headway today, working on improving pedestrian safety in the village of South Orange, NJ. They’ve learned about the major reasons for accidents and are tackling solutions to improve both driver and pedestrian awareness. We hope to present to several leaders of the village soon. Their next steps are to start laying out what and how they want to present the project, and bringing in the rest of the team to the process

Robot Competition & Build – Our lead coder has been focused! She’s worked on the code during the week and figuring out how the EV3 Mindstorms software works and understanding the coding blocks. She came into the meeting having figured out the color sensor this week! After a bit of troubleshooting, the robot was making its way down the black line to Mission 7, The Swing! We took some time to understand the best way to make the swing, well swing. We tested the touch sensor with an attachment (a battering ram), but found it not forceful enough to trigger the touch sensor. Then we used the distance sensor and wala!, its stopped before the swing and after the battering ram knocked into the swing. The team will be refining the battering ram and code. We have some ideas for the next mission to tackle.

I’ll be missing the coming weeks meeting due to business travel, so Coach Jake will lead the charge again!