Update on Team Activities and Future

As we draw closer to Kickoff, the team has been very busy making sure that everything is ready for build season. We've been meeting regularly each week, preparing new members, finishing our community service project with Max, and putting the finishing touches on this year's t-shirts. This year the team seems more focused, motivated, determined, and organized than ever before. Today I went around and asked a member of each sub-team to give me a little report about what they have been up to. A short description of each team's activities is below.

Drive-Train and Chassis:

• Planning the design for, and building a prototype of what we plan to use as our drive-train this year.
• They also finished the community service project they were doing for Max. 

Programming:

• Learning the fundamentals of programming
• Practicing programming on Windriver 
• Have programmed the new protobot and practiced their programming skills with it. 

Marketing:

• We have devised a fundraising idea in which a few volunteer members of the team will go door to door asking people if they would like us to shovel their snow after a storm. We are planning on charging about $20 to have a five man team shovel the person's yard and to tell them that they will be supporting the robotics team. 
• Our customized Frisbee design is now completed and we are currently in the process of ordering the frisbees. When they arrive, we plan to sell them for $3. Right now we are ordering about 200 frisbees and we only need to sell 85 in order to break even. Any frisbees left over will be given out at competition. Also, before we decided to sell the frisbees, Caitlin and Michelle did a good job surveying the high school to see if students would actually want to buy them. 
• The t-shirt design is now finished and we are in the process of ordering those as well. 
• Working on the new website to make sure it is uploaded this year.
• We have produced four podcasts so far and we recorded a fifth episode tonight. 

Electronics:

• Continuing to work on creating the modularized plug-and-play wiring system 
• They fixed the camera!
• Learning how to use Solidworks to model parts, etc.  

Arm-Effector:

• The arm-effector team has been working alongside the Drive-train group to design the new chassis for this year due to a lower number of mentors. 
• They also helped to put together the new chairs for that Alan bought for the lab (which are quite snazzy).

We have a few more meetings before kickoff where we are going to try to finish any last minute preparations. As a way to foster team unity before we set off into our most intensive season, the team is planning to hold a spaghetti dinner the night before Kickoff, which is January 9th at Northeastern University.

KwarQcast Episode 4: Everybody Clap Your Hands!

      This is the fourth episode of the KwarQcast, a podcast about the Watertown High School Robotics Team. In today's episode Keith, Dan, and Caitlin talk about what all the teams have been doing and Dan interviews Chris about his involvement in the team. Topics this week include the final decision of the Frisbee debate, our new snow shoveling fundraiser, the technology assembly we had last week, Chris’s safety, and our ideas for the future of the podcast. Sit back, relax, and enjoy our best episode yet. 

To listen to the podcast click here:    KwarQcast_ep_4.mp3

KwarQcast Ep 3: Looks Like We Made It

This is the third episode of the KwarQcast, a podcast about the Watertown High School Robotics Team. 

In today's episode Keith and Dan talk about what all the teams have been doing, Dan interviews Amory about his involvement in the team, and Caitlin joins in at the end to talk about her ideas for the team. In addition, we have a bit of audio of the team hard at work in the lab to show just how busy we are right now. 

To listen to the podcast click here: KwarQcast_ep_3.mp3
Oh and by the way, to fully understand the name of this post you have to listen to the last 20 seconds of the podcast

KwarQcast on iTunes!

The KwarQcast, our team's podcast, is now officially on iTunes! You can find it by simply searching KwarQs on the iTunes store or by clicking here. Please subscribe to the podcast and if you are feeling really nice give us a good review. A new episode should be up by the end of this week and will have improved audio from last week.

Final T-Shirt Logo

Below is the logo that was created for this year's t-shirts. It was designed by Keith and the rest of the marketing team and created by Katie Purchase. Leave your comments and feedback below. 

On a side-note, Alan has uploaded the pictures from the team's project adventure day. You can view those here.

KwarQcast Episode 2

This is the second episode of the KwarQcast, a podcast about Watertown High School’s Robotics Team. In this episode Dan is joined by his Co-host Keith for the first time. 

There is a lot of great, important, and ridiculous information in this podcast. Topics include our presentation at school committee, Raboni coming to visit, Spirit Week, and much more. Sorry about the weird audio buzz on this one, but we’re still learning and it will be fixed for next week’s episode. For anyone wondering the podcast is about 30 minutes long and we have a bunch of different segments this week. In the future we're planning on including even more members of the team. Thanks for listening.

To listen to the podcast click here:     kwarqcast_epi_2.mp3

The KwarQs First Podcast

So Keith and I (Dan) have been talking about what new things the marketing sub-team could do this year and one of our ideas was to make a podcast for the team. Last night I put together the first episode by myself but future installments will include Keith and anyone else who wants to join in. The podcast is called the KwarQcast and the intro music is Our_Heroes by ramblinglibrarian (which is from a website full of music that is not copyrighted). In this episode, I explain what the team and FIRST is all about and a talk about what the team has been up to. I should note that this first episode is a lot more armature than future ones will be because I was just figuring things out and not using Keith's advanced audio equipment. In addition, future episodes will feature more segments and we'll actually write down some notes about what we're going to talk about. To download the podcast click the link below.


http://ia341321.us.archive.org/0/items/KwarqcastPilot/kwarqcast_pilot.mp3