FLL: How Do You Practice at Home?
Some FLL teams face a challenge: how do individual team members practice at home without a mat? FLL teams can purchase extra mats by buying additional field kits. However, these kits aren't available to individual teams after the registration period closes.
What creative ways do your team members use to practice at home?
Comments
After our robot's work is on its way, we start assigning research as "homework". Each member recieves an assignment they need to complete at home. Since we meet twice a week, one meeting is dedicated to robot, and one is for putting together what we researched.
A week or so left to competition, we being to practice daily (or, however much we can)... what time we have at home is rest time. :)
This is how we do it... what about you?
Richard
The two teams here practice twice a week together and several times a week together just prior to matches.
Several team members find it advantageous to practice solo with the robot at home.
Has anyone found it advantageous to purchase extra mats at the beginning of the season? (The teams here didn't, but wished they had).
Rick
So if a team wants two field kits, it must pay two registration fees ($200 each) and two field kit fees ($65 each).
I have always thought that if a team is allowed to purchase two robot kits, it should be allowed to purchase two field kits, but I guess it would be too hard to predict how many kits to manufacture, and unsold kits couldn't be reused the next year.
Linda Zoe
Are they just practicing running, or doing the actual developement? If it's the developement... how do you transport all the materials (the hundreds of pieces) and everything? We could never do this because we never found a way to move everything from house to house.
"...but I guess it would be too hard to predict how many kits to manufacture, and unsold kits couldn't be reused the next year."
I agree that they can't reuse them next year... but so many teams want a practice kit or something to use over the summer, or a solo kid that doesn't belong to team wants to play. (this was me for a while)
Richard
The reason kids can practice individually at home is that each team member was provided an education kit that they could use solely at home. (These are in addition to the team kits they use for practice).
All of this is thanks to a corporation in town which sponsors the entire team. (I know that not every team has this advantage).
Kids have traced sections of the mat on paper and use those at home. They also take measurements of the mat and then run the "course" on their home floor. However, both of these methods are cumbersome.
I just wondered how other people ran the course at home, if they had the opportunity.
Linda: I hope Lego Ed can find a way to provide field mats on an "a la carte" basis, instead of making teams purchase extra registrations as well. But I do see the supply/demand problems that could result from a la carte purchases.
Linda Zoe
The Robot Game is only 25% of the score. So if anyone on your team has the incentive to put in extra time at home then it is usually beneficial to have them work on
1) The research project
a) their end of the research
b) practicing their end of the presentation ( i.e. a script)
2) teamwork: studying the FLL sites and learning about gracious professionalism - or just reading about how to conduct oneself as a good team player.
3) Robot Design:
a) LEGO Digital Designer attachment or robot chassis mock ups
b) programming flow documentation
c) Programming various sensors without FLL mat surfaces
d) button sensor techniques to to combine programs
e) myblock code refactoring
f) fine tune datalogging and other debugging techniques
g) robot arm attachments prototypes ( You don't need an FLL model to do this. You just need to prove that you can move an arm in a desired direction.)
4) online collaboration
a) meeting minutes
b) email latest source code to entire team
In short, there are many areas not related to the table that individuals can focus on. So if you have team members that are willing to work at home then there are plenty of activities that you can delegate to those members outside of the regular practices.
David Levy
3rd year Div 1 Coach.
Reston VA USA
This is very helpful advice. I'm sharing it will all of my co-leaders.