June 22nd Meeting

From the Coaches

First off, I wanted to let everyone know that I did not remember to ask one of the kids to write up their report of what we did at the meeting, so this week will only be from the coaches perspective.

On to the meeting.

We started off by reviewing what we did at the last meeting.  We had programmed the robot to follow a black line.  After going through a quick review of what we had done and how we had done it, we made a few improvements to the algorithm to allow the robot to follow a line more quickly and move more smoothly.

Next we gave the kids a challenge.  They needed to get the robot down to the other end of the mat and find the runway using the light sensor.  The runway was a darker gray than the rest of the mat, so we thought they should be able to use that fact to sense when the robot was on the runway.

We discussed several ways that they might be able to find the runway:
1) Constantly sense the color/light until they found the runway
2) Add a touch sensor, drive to the other end of the board and touch the wall.  When the robot touches the wall, turn on the light sensor and back up and turn until it hits the gray of the runway
3) Drive a certain distance down the board and then turn on the light sensor to begin searching for the runway
4) Drive across the board until it hits the black line, turn right, drive until it finds the next black line and then continue driving until it finds the gray of the runway.

The boys discussed the options and decided to go with option 4.  They began programming the robot to find the first black line.  The first problem they encountered was that the base is surrounded with black lines, so the robot turned as soon as it hit the first black line.  They solved this issue by starting out with one rotation forward so they knew the robot was out of the base, then they started looking for the black line.

Next, they were having issues with the robot turning when it did not find the black line.  After much trial and error and inspection of the code, it turned out that they had mixed up their greater than and less than signs.  After they fixed that, they were able to get the robot to turn when it found the black line.

At the end of the meeting, we spent about 15 minutes discussing some of the First Lego League Core Values.  We discussed what it means to be a part of a team.  The boys had a lot of great insight into what it means to be a team.  We spent a lot of time talking about how important good communication is and what that actually means.