Lessons Learned
There were many lessons learnt from different members of our team. One of our members said that Botball taught them how to program and use C language to see robot complete tasks. One of our recorders said that online documentation, expressed how deadlines were really important, and could affect how the team worked. He also said that the project plan helped the team predict what we were going to do and when. The project plan helped our team stay focused, and predict when we were going to be done with the game. The documentation process helped us express our ideas onto paper, and then later onto a submission. We also learnt that repetitive testing and prototyping can be changed and that the program doesn’t always work the first time. Both of our team leaders also had a lot to say about what they learned this year.
One of our team leaders, Arvind, said that there was not enough work for everyone. He also said that C-Language put a practical use for him in school, and helped him in some of his classes in school. Arvind also stated that he felt that he may have taken on too many tasks and would like to remind future generations of Botballers that work should always be divided up among several people. However, Arvind says that overall he enjoyed competing in Botball this year and hopes that other enjoy competing in it in future years as well.
Our more senior team leader, Eliot, says that he still managed to learn several new things even though this is his third year doing Botball. Eliot says that he found that it can be difficult to make other people do what you want at times and it helps to bribe them with snacks. Eliot also coded one of our robots this year and would like to remind everyone that the create needs to be turned on in order to be capable of movement. Eliot was extremely surprised this year by how quickly his team was able to finish their robots and finish the code for them as well. Eliot says that teams usually are finishing their robot’s code during the last week, but we finished our code during the 6th week, giving us 2 weeks to test how our robot’s code worked.
Advice to Future Botball Teams
1) Review work shop material and do all the exercises, done at the workshop.
2) Be realistic in putting together the project plan and following through.
3) Always make sure the Create is turned on at the beginning of a round.
4) Don’t fool around, and focus on the task presented to you.
5) Have fun! It’s easier to work when you enjoy what you’re doing.