Hopefully the event goes off well. The ever increasing expertise of my helpers is counterbalanced by declining levels of student technical skills and by the general disintegration of supplies, especially batteries.
There is a greater degree of "biodiversity" in this year's field of competitors. Two wheel and four wheel pushers. A two robot multibot and a three robot "unit". A couple of spinning bars, a grinder disc, a fairly flimsy looking flipper. One.....maybe two saw blade bots. A rare full body spinner. I figure more than half the field will be somewhat interesting.
With the general tardy nature of the work there has of course been minimal time for drive practice. I'm ok with that, learn on the job.
In fact the entire improv nature of Machines Behaving Badly is part of the point. Immutable Deadlines, obeying the laws of physics, attempting to find loopholes in all other rule sets....good training for future robotics. And in fact roughly 2/3 of the high school FIRST team come to us via the MBB route. Of course the first thing I have to do is "un-teach" them a lot of sloppy technique involving lava flows of hot glue.
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