Our Missions

HOW WE LEARNED TO PROGRAM:
Not everyone on our team this year had participated in FLL before, everyone did have some experience programming the NXT.  Returning members worked to mentor the new team members to help them understand what FLL entails.  To practice, we completed some practice missions using the 2011 Food Factor field.  When we program, we use a “Program Cycle” (Plan, Write, Test, Revise).   We use mission cards, task lists, and flow-control diagrams to be sure we understand what we need to do to accomplish a mission.

HOW WE CHOSE OUR MISSIONS:
Our current plan for the robot game was to divide up the mission map into multiple parts so we could divide and conquer the different parts of the mat. Unfortunately our score was not as high as we wanted so we decided to see if we could update our current strategies to get a higher score in the robot game.


USE OF MY BLOCKS:
Because our time was short, we decided it would be helpful to start by programming “My Blocks” that would let us travel a specified distance  (“x-distance” and “x-distance reverse”) or make a turn by adding a variable containing the distance to travel or degrees to turn.  We decided to focus on pivot turns since there isn't a lot of room on the field.  This ended up saving us a lot of time since we didn't have to calculate and program move or motor blocks each time we had to move the robot.

USE OF SENSORS:
This year we're definitely making more use of sensors.  We're using Light, Color, and Ultra Sonic sensors in most of our programs.  We're using the touch sensor for starting missions.  We are getting a lot more consistent.  We are using sensors to line-follow and also to line (square up) on a line.

ISSUES:
This year the battery has been a big factor.  It seems to run down really fast and then all sorts of things start going wrong in the programs.  We've also had some issues with the color sensor picking up the wrong color or not picking up anything at all.

We did consistency testing to check the accuracy of both straight movement and turns.  We ran the tests with the robot only, then with a light attachment (the lever arm that we use for most missions), and also with our heaviest attachment - the scissor attachment.  We noticed that straight movements were fairly consistent, but as we added attachments, our turns got less consistent.  We think the weight on the robot is unbalanced.  We've also noticed some wheel camber.  Turns have been an issue with many missions.

LOCAL TOURNAMENT:
Sometime in early-to-mid November.  We can't wait!

OUR MISSIONS: