Food Bank Bonanza!

Hey Everyone!

          Last Saturday, almost half the team visited the Northern Illinois Food Bank and helped out. Our team has gotten lots of help from the mayor and our community in general, so it was great to give back to the community who has helped us so much. The Northern Illinois Food Bank is committed to solving world hunger by providing nutritious meals to the impoverished in the Boone, DuPage, DeKalb, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, Ogle, Stephenson, Will, and Winnebago counties. The team members started out by unloading food from the truck, sorting it, and then organizing it into an assembly line. Later, when people started coming in, they helped them pick out and load their food into their cars. Overall, the whole experience was fun and rewarding for everyone. The team members that went enjoyed the experience a lot, and said they would do it again. Look out for a blog post in the coming weeks about our next community outreach event at Feed My Starving Children!

The Final Push

This weekend the team met Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 8am to 4pm and even later. Chairman’s team has continued working on their Chairman’s award video. They have also begun editing and finalizing their essays for the Dean’s Award and the Chairman’s Award. With the build season coming to a close Chairman’s takes pride in reflecting on this season and even past seasons as they write of our teams successes in their award essays. Saturday the team received their tie-dye hoodies that they will be wearing this year during competitions. Everybody wore them on Monday for a team picture. In regards to the robot, before bag and tag last night Programming team made sure that their code was functional and ready for competition. Safety team continued working on the pit pieces. Mechanical team and Design team made last minute fine adjustments to the robot, while Controls team wired the controls board for the practice robot and hooked up the LED lights and sensors.  

LEGO Outreach Program

Yesterday members from Chairman’s team met in the printing lab to work on producing the shirts for our STEMbots outreach program. Today they opened up the Lego kits to test them out and get a feel for the sets they would be helping the kids create. Tomorrow elementary and middle school children will be coming for the outreach program. The plan is for them to use the Lego Education WeDo STEM Classroom packs to experience a series of cross-curricular theme-based activities while developing their skills in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, language, literacy, and social studies. Through the piloting of our Lego outreach activities we hope to be able to create a summer program to further teach children about Robotics. Members of Chairman’s are also creating poster designs for the Midwest Regional. While Chairman’s has been hard at work editing their Chairman’s award video, Programming, Mechanical, Controls, and Design team have been working together on building and maintaining the robot. They have been persisting recently with redesigning mechanisms for the robot as they have experienced problems with some of their previous designs.

Chairman's Video

Today Chairman’s team handed out raffle tickets to all the team members. The raffle tickets need to be sold for the Team Banquet on April 21^st. Each team member must sell 15 tickets for $5 each. They also spent the day filming in the auditorium for the Chairman’s award video and voice recording for the video. Programming team tested code on the inner chassis and troubleshot network problems. Safety team has continued their pursuit of painting the pit pieces today, as they painted trident details. Mechanical team redesigned the lift mechanism, shortened shafts, and moved back the cross brace for the chassis. Controls team wired the lift and got the Robot driving and lifting. Design team redesigned the claw for the game device, the bearing for the lift, and the shafts for the drive train as well as changed the pulley configuration. Tomorrow we will have a full day meeting, similar to today.

Picture Day

Yesterday the team didn’t meet due to the winter storm, so members enjoyed time at home. Today began with taking our team photo for the yearbook. It took awhile for us to be let into the auditorium, so we didn’t start to work till after 4pm. Chairman’s team is continuing their effort with the Chairman’s award video. Safety team continued to paint the pit. Programming team tested the game pieces today and troubleshot code. Mechanical team finished prototyping the robot, built the winch mechanism, and mounted the pulleys for the lift mechanism. Controls team worked on getting last year’s robot to work, and wired the encoders and gyro. Design team made amends to the mounting system for the claw and the spools that drive the lifts.