The Chickadee's First Weekly Meeting

Last night, the November 10, 2015, The Chickadees had their first of many weekly meetings. We started off the meeting by dividing into two teams and with 20 spaghetti noodles, a yard of tape, string, and a marshmallow, we had to create the tallest, freestanding structure we could that would still hold the marshmallow at the top without breaking. This 18 minute project got us thinking about working as a team and many more important aspects that will be needed to be successful in building our robot. Afterward, The Chickadees discussed the engineering design process where we mainly focused on the first couple steps due to how soon we will need to implement these new strategies. Another great opportunity in today’s meeting was the chance to review some of the previous championships and see a little history of the FIRST Robotics competition. This was inspiring to see how far we could potentially go with robotics. Before our next meeting, The Chickadees are tasked with thinking up design ideas for a logo to represent our team, checking out the 2012 game rule manual for first robotics to get a basic understanding of the requirements, and looking at http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/portal.php which is a website with everything FIRST, including ideas and views of fellow engineers. Don’t worry about reading the entire rule book in detail as it is a very long document, but get an understanding of some things that may be required. The meeting was a success and we are excited to get to continue learning the steps towards building a robot.

--Alexa