Less than a Month

This past week has been very busy and productive!  Nice work, everyone.  In addition to last Wednesday's meeting we had another garage sale on Saturday along with more building and project work, and another team meeting on Monday.

Where this puts us with just under a month to go is:

Robot: Can accomplish all missions for Zones 1, 2, and 3, for a total of 190 points.  If everything goes smoothly we can get those 90 points with slightly less than a minute to spare, so we can likely add more missions over the next few weeks.  We need, though, to focus on reliability.  That means doing more of what we did yesterday: running missions over and over to find out where things go wrong and improving them, and getting used to setting up and running the robot repeatably.

Project: We've had Hannah's prototype for a few weeks now, and she's gotten some good practice presenting it.  In addition, Nic's made good progress on an Arduino-based version of Hannah's prototype, which if it can work would cost a lot less, use less energy, and be less obvious in a bathroom.

We still need to work on our team presentation, and have been talking about a Phineas and Ferb skit where our project foils the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz and his plan to take over the tri-state area.  Think hard about how we can fit all the information we need to present into that type of skit.

Core Values: With a lot of help from Ella team spirit and teamwork have been really improving.  In fact, I believe there was a coach-free meeting at school to discuss how to organize a book sale. Check Slack to see Ella's suggestions for how to answer judges' questions.  We'll be working on this tomorrow.

5 Weeks to Go

With five weeks to go before the regionals, we've got our work cut out for us.  Good work on Ella's core values exercise!  If we can complete each other's sentences we're a close-knit team for sure!

Helen took us through an important communication exercise and discussion of project tasks.  Below is the prioritized list of project features we came up with, based on how much people complained about existing problems and how hard we thought they'd be to solved.

At the top of the list are a) Too slow, b) Uses too much gas/electricity, c) Timer is too difficult to adjust, and d) Too noisy)

Prioritized list of product features.

These four items are things we said were important and easy to do.  So, how do we do them?  (Or any of the others on the list for that matter?)  Please get on Slack and post your suggestions!

Bill Allen discussing hot water problems with the team.

It was great to meet Bill Allen (that name is one of several possible facts you'll need to know for the homework exercise).  He is an actual plumbing expert, given his years of experience both as a plumber himself and as an owner of a plumbing company.  It was good to get his suggestions on approaches to our problem.  One of his suggestions was to connect the pump to the shower light switch, so that when somebody turns on the shower light the water gets heated automatically.  It would be good to know how many showers have a light just for the shower.  For homework please check the showers in your house and see whether there's a light just for the shower, or whether the light is for the whole bathroom.  It probably wouldn't be ideal to heat the water every time someone turned on the bathroom light.

Lastly, with some mentoring from Ella, we made some good progress on the robot.  Hannah, Tara, Macy, and Alyssa sped up the Flow mission and made it more reliable, and also completed the Faucet mission.  That gets us to a reliable 120 points, up from last week's 95.  Good job!

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Comet Warriors!  Good work last week, and congratulations to Nick on the Homework Award.

Among other things, we got 3 out of 4 Zone 1 missions working, some of which are shown in the video below:

In addition, with the cancellation of the weekend Garage Sale due to bad weather, we got the Pump Addition mission finished as well.  That finishes off Zone 1.  Those missions together give us 95 points with another five and a half weeks before the tournament.  Not bad, but still plenty of work left to do.

Thank you Ella for another interesting, fun, and valuable Core Values exercise.  Building a Lego model of our research problem was a great teamwork exercise and the team did much better than we did at the start of the season.

Olivia posted a document on Slack listing the problems people have with existing Hot Water Recirculation products.  Please read it!  We've got a solution to one of these problems, we hope, but there are still plenty more.  For this week please think hard about how these remaining problems could be fixed.  Could we make the timer easier to adjust?  How?  Could we make the water heat up quicker?  How?  And so on.

If we can decide whether these problems are easy, medium, or difficult to solve we could combine that information with how much people complain about them and come up with a prioritized list of which problems to work on.

Also, on the topic of the project, Macy's Uncle Bill (name of the week) may be able to visit with us on Wednesday to give his thoughts on what we're trying to do.  So come prepared to discuss our project so far, and whatever additional ideas you come up with between now and then.

Lastly, the First Lego League organizers would like to know who would like badges this season showing how many years they've been involved with FLL.  The badges are a few dollars each, so if you'd like one let us know.

A Busy Week

Congratulations, Warriors, on a very busy and productive week!  Our yard sale was a big success, raising $190.  Kudos to Neshaya for organizing that, and thanks to everyone for helping out, manning tables, recruiting customers, and rounding up donations.

Alyssa and Macy Selling Like Crazy

For our project we did a lot of work to understand how much energy is required to heat water, how much water needs to be heated to start a shower, and how much energy is required to keep heating it while the shower is running.  We also learned how quickly the heat is lost once the shower stops, whether its through plastic or copper pipes, 1/2" or 3/4" diameter, and insulated or not.

Lais Heating Water

Nick Logging Data

Cooling Rates for PEX Pipes

With all of this information we should be able to figure out how much it costs to operate different solutions to our problem of wasted water.

We also worked on prototypes of our innovative solution.  Existing solutions either heat the water whenever it goes cold, or else whenever it gets cold within certain hours.  Using Lego controllers, motors, and sensors, Hannah built a hot water re-circulation system that only turns on if a) someone enters the bathroom, and b) the water is cold.  It then recirculates the hot water until the water in the pipe is hot, and then stops.  It does this by sending Bluetooth (wurd of the week)  messages from an EV3 that would go under the sink, to a second EV3 at the water tank which would turn the water on and off.  Congratulations, Hannah!  If we make no further progress we've at least got a working prototype of our system.

Lily and Olivia worked on the missions for Zone 1 over the weekend and can fairly reliably do the Water Filtration and Pump Addition missions, with good progress on the Rain mission as well.

This week we hope to make more progress on the robot missions, and to look for ways to improve or reduce the cost of our prototype solution.