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Decisions are hard to make. Someone once said, “When you make a decision, go with it and don’t look back.” This is exactly what Team 1723 did this week. The team faced some hard decisions due to the large number of good options to choose from. Eli Freeman’s goal for the week was to finally make a decision on our robot mechanism.  Over the last week, Jacob Keefe continued to help prototype ideas for our mechanism. On Saturday, January 17, 2015, the team agreed on making a hybrid robot that can collect totes from the human player AND has a fork lift/arms to pick-up totes and containers.

The decision about student leaders for the team has also been announced: Aimee Dietiker and Jacqueline Stock are our team captains; Eli Freeman is head of programming; Renan Troy is head of scouting; Jacqueline Stock is also build captain, and Michaela Ebert is head of public relations.

       After finding out what the game is for this year, our team has been working hard this week with only success on their minds. In the first build week of 2015 our team came up with different strategies and prototyping ideas. We worked with them for the last week to see which idea would work the best for our team.

David Bogue is one of our rookies. He has been prototyping an internal lift for our robot. His goal for this year is to stack one tote with one container on top. He continues to prototype his ideas to meet his goal.

Another member of the F.B.I. team is Aimee Dietiker. She has spent the last week on control systems, prototyping, and organizing. She started working on a container or tote mechanism, but she decided wouldn’t work. Instead of giving up on her goal of building a working robot that perform our programming, she started working on a new stacking mechanism that will stack in the middle of the robot to keep the stack stabilized.

Cailyn Crowley worked on a prototype with a conveyor belt intake and a trash truck like idea. Her goal was to be as helpful and supportive of her team as possible.  She believes that you can get a decent amount done and still have room to improve.

Behind the scenes, Ashlyn Messer has spent the week taking photographs of the team while we work. Her goal is to not be rushing during the last couple of weeks of build season.  To achieve this she and other members of public relations have been working on team badges. We will continue into next week to finalize our strategy for this year’s game.