The last few weeks have been very busy for the AdamBots. We have participated in another OCCRA competition, attended the Halloween Hoot cleanup outreach activity, held our annual team-building Road Rally, and more.

On Sunday, October 20th, we participated in the annual Halloween Hoot at Dinosaur Hill. We helped clean up after the Hoot by emptying luminaries and tying them up for next year, cleaning up the trail, and organizing the sand box where the luminaries are placed. You can view pictures of the Hoot here.

The week after was spent mostly in preparation for our competition on Thursday at Waterford Kettering High School. The Build Team worked on modifying and improving. We started adding a hanging system that, although mostly installed, is not currently functioning. We also continued to finalize the design of the rollers, test the shooter, and practice driving.

Those taking part in the Build Workshops went into the build room. There, they had a closer look at the OCCRA robot and how it was built. They also bolted on a plexi-carbon control panel, our transmissions, and the wheels. Finally, they learned how to use a horizontal bandsaw.

The Programming Team has begun teaching with the Java and explaining the concepts of object oriented programming and encapsulation. These are good-programming-practices which help make organizing large amounts of code, which is important to be able to deal with for FIRST. We also developed and reviewed the code for the OCCRA robot, which has been working at the competitions so far! The code for the team’s chassis study is also underway.

In Marketing this week we wrapped up from the last competition and looked ahead to future ones. We devised a plan for advertising future events the AdamBots will have!

In Digital Media we divided decided which group members will work on updating which social media sites. We talked about who is going to post at each event. We also talked about what questions we’re going to ask the Alumni and Mentors during interviews.

The Photo/Video Team was busy with taking pictures and videos at the OCCRA competition we went to, as well as updating the website with new photos and galleries. The team did not meet the Friday following the competition, though, and will meet again next Friday, as normal.

Our competition was at Waterford Kettering High School. It was not one of our most successful competitions; our robot was not performing at the level we would have liked. Though we played each of our matches, we had some problems with our rollers that kept us from winning enough to place. However, our work on the placebo robot helped win us a Judge’s Award.

On Saturday, we held our annual Road Rally team building exercise. Around 95% of students on the team participated. The Rally brought us all around Rochester in search of clues and locations and it was very fun and a great way for veterans, new students, and adults to work together to solve a problem. Winners received gift certificates.

Written by Cameron Johnson

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