Thursday 6th February 2025, this week we were relatively productive working hard to tie any loose ends as Qualifiers are rapidly approaching. We also spend more time outside of our session this week working on the robot and testing.

(And, of course, we split off into our usual sub-teams to ensure we all got work done and weren’t disturbing each other.)

Hardware and Assembly

In terms of hardware and assembly, it was a relatively normal week – we attached more of our pre-made parts and tested how they functioned. We are still prototyping our intake – so more discussion was centred around that.

Some photos:

Outreach and Fundraising 

Our Valentine’s Bake Sale is approaching and we had some final touches to add in order to finalise the whole plan. As our school has 3 FTC teams, we all work together for the baking effort and we only see the other 2 teams every fortnight so we had to communicate everything this week. We made a document entailing who was baking, quantities and allergens. During the session we also considered who would be running the stall on the day and who would go round the school the day before, reminding all the forms of the sale – something we do every bake sale. However we didn’t finalise a decision on this as both would be done by members of our teams so didn’t need to be sorted out there and then and could be communicated at a later date.

Outside of Sessions

This time outside of our session we were very productive as well, I’m even tempted to say more-so than within our session. Our drivers finally got time to test out the robot – our Player 2’s first time driving the robot in Team Cipher. Both beginning to familiarise themselves with the controls until they become second nature.

Furthermore we began properly filling in our Engineering Portfolio, thanks to our Data Officer. We also decided to make it look a little nicer than previous years – opting to add banners on each page to add some flair to it. The rest of us also took time out of our lessons to work on this as well as starting our presentation for the interview at Qualifiers.

In terms of Outreach, we got in contact with the three main primary schools, in our local area, for an opportunity to work with their students to hopefully inspire them with what we do. And on the 7th of February, one of them got back to us, agreeing to let us run sessions for their Year 5s and 6s. They said they’d like us to do four sessions of 30-60 mins, which we were very pleased with. And after the initial excitement of the acceptance of our request ceded, we immediately got to brainstorming what we’d do in those sessions. We’ve considered ideas such as doing demonstrations with our robot and/or getting them to design robots to solve simple problems, as well as many other options. Currently we haven’t decided on a final idea of what to do in the sessions but we’re very excited at this opportunity and plan to run them not long after Qualifiers.