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!
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