In December the team would frequently play the video of Ylvis’ “The Fox” while working, and we started making up our own Nature’s Fury-related lyrics. I told the team if they qualified for the Regional Championship we’d make a video.
The organizers from the Perot Museum then let us premiere the video at the championship yesterday.
Station KDFW (Fox 4) did a live broadcast at yesterday’s Regional Championships, here’s the news story. Enjoy!
On the North Texas FLL coaches’ mailing list there’s been a lot of discussion and confusion regarding the height of the border walls on the tables used by the Perot Museum in the region’s contests. Yesterday and today our team attended the Coppell HS FLL scrimmage, which once again was a great success. Since the tables used at the scrimmage were reportedly from the Perot Museum (can anyone confirm this for us?), I was finally able to take some definitive measurements.
The tops of the border walls appear to be between 3″ and 3 1/8″ above the mat surface. See the photo below. If you’re wondering how it’s possible for the walls to have this height, it appears to me that the walls were created from 2×4 studs that have been jointed and planed on the bottom to produce a perfectly square fit with the table surface. Thus the sides are somewhat less than the 3.5″ one would expect with unfinished 2×4 studs.
While at the table I also took measurements of the height of the cargo plane lever; it appears to vary between 4 5/8″ and 4 7/8″ above the mat surface. Because the walls are actually slightly taller than 3″, I expect the cargo plane models to be exactly as in the model build instructions, with none of the modifications for “short border walls” described in the challenge document. The angle of the red lever depends a little bit on the way the plane is loaded and the tension of the string.
I hope this helps resolve questions and helps teams prepare for the qualifier tournaments. However, don’t absolutely count on these heights — some Perot tables could be different from others, and “things happen” such that a qualifier might end up using tables from another source. As mentioned in the challenge documents, teams are expected to design for border walls ranging anywhere from 2.5″ to 3.5″ in height.
We’ve finally gotten some more concrete details about the Coppell FLL scrimage — it will be held on Saturday, November 2nd at Coppell High School from 2:30p to 4:30p.
Unlike previous years, this scrimmage will not be held at the same time as the Engineering Expo, which is on November 3rd.
The last of the UTD Coaches’ Clinics are also being planned for Saturday, although the exact times are not yet known.
Messages about the scrimmage and clinics can be found here, here.
The organizers have asked attendees to please fill out a form.
Hope to see many of you on Saturday!
Today was the first UTD Coaches Clinic’ for 2013, hosted again by Dr. Kenneth Berry. It was wonderful to meet so many new coaches and see another exciting year get underway!
If you’re a new coach or a rookie team, we know you likely have lots of questions and trepidation. We’re glad to help where we can.
As in previous years, our team is maintaining a resources page with links and copies of documents relating to the North Texas Regional FLL tournaments. The page is available at http://republicofpi.org/projects/fll2013/resources/ , or you can follow the “FLL” links in the menu above.
We create and maintain this page for our own benefit — to make it easy to have announcements and files all in one place. But we also know it can be useful for others, and we like to share it freely. If you can think of anything else that would be helpful to have available on the page, please let us know!
If nothing else, be sure to join the North Texas FLL Google Group — lots of announcements and helpful discussions take place there.
Pm
At last year’s North Texas regional qualifier tournament, the team’s robot did not perform as well as expected. After reviewing the robot’s performance, we decided that the practice table we had been using was partially to blame. So it was time to build a new one.
The video below shows the table we came up with. One important feature of the table is that it disassembles into pieces small enough to fit into our van, so we can take our FLL equipment to other schools and organizations for demonstrations. Indeed, this was the table we used for our Discovery Days exhibit at the Perot Museum earlier this year.
Enjoy!
We’ve posted some videos with the team’s top-scoring practice runs on YouTube. For a wide variety of reasons the robot never achieved 580 in the Robot Game competition… its best competition score was 530. However, it regularly achieved 580 in the Robot Design judging rounds.
For the North American Championship the robot was upgraded to be able to score 590 and to be able to activate the ball game from the center platform just as time expires. Hopefully we’ll get a video of that soon.
Enjoy!
There are two other practice videos available (these are also 580 point runs):
Here are some videos of the team’s robot runs at the North Texas Regional FLL Championship, held on January 12, 2013. Enjoy!
Model Scout Robotics won 1st place in robot Mechanical Design at the FLL North American Open Championship! Our robot “Scoutbot Pi” also took 5th place in the Robot Game with a score of 480 points.
74 top teams from throughout the United States, Canada, and Korea competed in the tournament held May 17-19 at LEGOLAND California.
Thank you to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and the other sponsors who helped us attend the tournament!
More details coming soon!
A couple of months ago Matthew built the MindCuber robot from mindcuber.com. Since then we’ve taken it to several demonstrations and contests and it’s always a big hit with the people that see it.
Here’s a video of the robot in action. We’re eager to see the program source so we can make some modifications to it!