Our unexpected extension has had the lovely side effect of being able to do things well. We can take the time to tweak the project and really try to get the robot to work as well as we can.
For the project we asked another mentor, Sophie, to help us with the design of our solution. Sophie is a prop/theatre designer by trade and we asked her to apply her skills in tweaking our product design. We had reached a stage where we had two alternative solutions to our problem and the team were finding it difficult to move forward and choose one. Sophie parachuted in and applied fantastic design principles to our products. She took the team back through the process, the decisions they had made so far and why they had made them. The team then re-checked the products available in the market and considered who might actually buy the products they had come up with.
The team have made a decision about which product they want to go with and the next stage is to make a prototype, this is quite tricky as the chosen material is most likely to be plastic - we shall wait to see what ingenious solutions they came up with to solve that one.
We are making slow but steady progress with the robot game. The robot can now reliably complete two tasks and hopefully these will be joined by a few more over the next few weeks. The first task has shown us the absolute importance of positioning the robot accurately and so this gives us a heads up on the programming. choose EXACTLY where the robot is going to start from and design your programme from there, measuring carefully each time (with a tape measure if necessary) before we set it off.
The downside of the extension is that it feels like a long slog now and some of the team are getting quite tired. I hope today's success and the possibility that we now know how to tackle this thing will keep us all going just a little bit longer.
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