Our team had a great day at Provincials.  We had so much fun and really enjoyed sharing with the other teams.  We even won a trophy, 2nd place Champions and 1st place Robot Performance.  Another great season, can't wait until next season!

Ok, let's face it.  So much work was done between Regionals and Provincials, I MAY of forgotten to update the blog.  So excuse the sudden time jump.  January 12th, a few of us went over to The University of Waterloo with a few of the Socialites to help set up.  That yellow tape along the bleachers? Us.  We also played the greatest Ninja game of all time, with one of those rolling things people use to move chairs.  Afterwards, we went to Kelseys (Specifically, all of the Socialites with Kalli and Me (Devon)).  

Back at the motel, we met up with a few more members and started practicing our core values and our script.  Then we all went to the pool.  Competition was tomorrow, and we were all pumped.

Today was basically sorting out what we have to do for provincials. What programs to fix, what parts of our project we can improve.  We also managed to add in a way to put the chair under the table, giving us an essential 10 points!

Eight different robot designs, three project ideas, six experts, countless hours staring at computers, and a whole lot of pizza later, we're at the Halton Regional Tournament at Holy Trinity.  We set up at our pit-stop .. and then immediately packed up and headed for our three judging rooms.  In order, they were Core Values, Robot, then Project.  After our rooms, we did two table runs.  The runners The high score of the two runs equaled 545, which is more than double the high score of the second place team.  In between our table runs, we would do activities such as nickel football,  human knot, and ninja, with the other teams. We also would explore the other teams boards and projects.

After a lunch of  pizza and rice krispie squares, we checked out what callbacks we had for judging.  We got callbacks for all three rooms!  We did all of our judging rooms, then finished our last three table runs.  The high score between the table runs was 580.  In the end we won 2 awards.  Mechanical design, and Robot performance.  We are also going to the provincials! 

We practiced and practiced and practiced.  And practiced.  We also finished making our triboard for competition (Technically quadboard now, because we added another panel).  We finished our robot run practice.  The three runners include myself (Devon), Kalli, and Basil.  Our highest possible score is 605.  It was a busy day.  Our competition was next week.

Today we had our friend Tristian here for the day to get a professional view of our buggy buddy.  Tristian works at Laborie.  He looked over our project and gave us a few ways that we could improve it.  We also managed to make a Solid Works model of our product, which helps us immensely with presenting. On the robot side, we finished the Garden, Cooperation challenge, stove, and ball game.  So, offically, we finished every mission except for the second half of our chair and table! 

    Today we went to the science centre for a second sharing opportunity.  This was only us and the other saturday team, along with an FRC team, and many other robotic themed events.  This was the science centres robotics feature for the weekend. We basically went through the same routine as last time, robot and project, with a computer for programming and a computer for our script-writing.  This was another one of our sharing experiences, differing from our open house because of a bigger audience (Not just parents or friends), and simply how loud the entire event was.  This experience's atmosphere was more like the actual regional competion

    Today was our open house.  All of the FLL teams, the FLL 101 team, and the Vex team set up and presented their progress to over 100 visitors at E-Bots.  Our team presented our robot progress (Which, at the time, was only bowling, strength machine, and dog), and our project progress (The cardboard cutouts of the buggy buddy, along with our triboard).  This was probably one of the biggest open houses at E-bots.  We also managed to get experience demonstrating our projust and robot for when we're at judging, or have to present our triboard to any visiting teams on our break.

Over the weekend, we worked on the strength machine attachment.  Also,  we implemented an idea that Andrew came up with for the blue carpet, dog, big eye test, chair grab, and red carpet.  We would line our robot against the blue carpets, then shot at the dog using a shooter.  We finished those missions this week.

On the project side of things, we've decided to scrap the automatic shopping cart in regards to pricing issues.  Only rich seniors would be able to buy it, and rich seniors would probably just hire someone to do their shopping for them.  Instead, we've decided to use something similar to TCM'S cupholder mold and started to make a system of attachments to make shopping simpler for seniors.  A few attachments we created for the shopping cart inculde a chair you can pull down to rest, a caneholder, and a shopping list. 

    Today was the day we perfected the bowling game programming, which would get the bowling pins knocked down, the small eye test activated, the flexibility tubes grabbed, and the green pill bottle grabbed.

Along with this, a few members of our team went over to another seniors centre in order to get interviews done for our project.  We gathered information such as how many people they shop(ped) for, what they would usually get, and the problems (if any) they experience while shopping.  We filled out about 50 sheets.