This week was a big work week for the AdamBots. With no competition Thursday or Saturday, we spent our time in our sub-teams working hard and making progress.

This week, the Build Team had a shortened week due to two days off school, but still managed to be very productive. We fine-tuned the shooter and spent a great deal of time testing and improving it. Also, the back rollers had a tendency to move upward as balls were pulled underneath them, so we added braces around them to keep them down and locked in place.

In our Build Workshop, we have been working on testing the wheel strength and power of one of our favorite robots, Margarita. We tested the pulling strength of the robot as it moved forward to judge our strength pushing against other robots, as well as the resistance our robot has while pulled sideways to judge how we stand while other robots push against us.

This week, the Business Plan Team initiated the update process for the various sections of the Plan.

This week in Marketing we continued to go over our newly assigned jobs. We assigned new jobs to more of the group members, and gave out certain tasks designed for each job description. We now have a new orderly fashion that we hope will work as a professional system. Also, earlier in the week, we hand-delivered our thank you letter to the Rochester Hills Dentistry office. To close up the meeting we put together our FIRST pit that will hold our robot and banner, and learned how to take it down for future competitions.

The Animation Team is here! In the last couple of days, we have done little in the way of work publicly, but we have many things planned and in progress. First, we plan to release tutorials and upload them to our website to help new animation members. We also plan to upload our annual safety animations and other completed projects to our website. This includes the 2014 safety animation that is already in progress, with the storyboard complete. To encourage the growth of animation on our own team and on other teams, we are also planning to hold animation workshops on Thursdays to help new members learn 3ds Max.

This week the Photo/Video Team started to plan for the Chairman’s video we are tasked to make for the 2014 FIRST season. We discussed various ways to go about making the video, and watched Chairman’s videos from other teams to help the newer students get an idea of what a Chairman’s video looks like.

This week the Digital Media Team met on Friday to check in on the progress of each student’s job. We also discussed a possible website redesign, and created accounts for each new student who would be working on editing and posting on the website. Our team also took care of Twitter and Facebook coverage for the competition that took place at Birmingham Groves High School last Thursday.

Next week we have a competition Thursday at Clawson High School and an all girls FIRST competition on Saturday featuring the 2013 FIRST game, Ultimate Ascent. Check in again to see what’s happening!

Written by Nina Janies

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