[CRUSH-all] great trip to Phoenix competition, let's get ready for Las Vegas

[Bill Bennett]

Team, we did great in Phoenix this weekend, and it was a lot of fun 
having so many team members and supporters together for the event. 
Thanks for everybody's cooperation and support.

Now let's get ready for Las Vegas. Because of spring break, we only have 
a few meetings to do this. The team is counting on all of you to show up 
and make it happen, so the work of getting us ready to go doesn't become 
an overload on just a few. We'll meet Tuesday and Thursday this week and 
then decided what else is needed. Maybe we'll meet one day during spring 
break or one of the Saturdays.

Here's what we need to do:
- Repack the trailer. We need to think harder about what to take and pay 
more attention to the pack list. We were missing a lot this trip. 
Fortunately, we were able to beg and borrow from other teams, or pick up 
needed items at the hardware store. Let's see how much we can avoid that 
on the next trip.

- Team members should all be better prepared to talk to judges. Any 
student should be able to talk at length and articulately about our 
team, our school, and our robot. We should be able to describe a dozen 
ways the team helps the students, school, and community. We should be 
able to discuss the details and merits of design choices made on the 
robot. We'll put together a memo summarizing these things, and every 
student should study it and practice talking about it. This is what will 
help the judges choose us for awards we've all worked hard to deserve.

- Improve our pit display. The new board is great, but we can do much 
more. Let's decide what to display on the other side of it - robot part 
drawings, descriptions of designs, etc. Let's make a technical summary 
of our robot  - steering system, software to control it, IR control 
during hybrid mode, torque and speed analysis of the back end drive, 
analysis of the grabber and ball lift, and so on. This could include the 
main game specs for the robot - lap speed, hurdling and capping speed, 
breakdown statistics, etc. This paper could be given to visiting judges 
and scouting teams. Similarly, we could have a team paper to give judges 
that tells all the stuff they care about (this doesn't replace talking 
to them).

- Get ready to do the chairman's presentation. We need two team members 
who are willing to present to judges for chairman's award, who will work 
with mentors to prepare and rehearse the presentation. The rest of the 
team can also be helpful with this as a critiquing audience.

So you see, we have some things to do. Let's make LV an even better 
experience than Phoenix.

Bill Bennett