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• Carolyn C.
Hey all! It’s a bit late, but we hope everyone has had a good start to their school year! We’re already more than halfway to build season… meaning it’s time for a preseason update! Below you’ll find what each division has been up to since the start of the school year, as well a recap on past events and where you’ll find Team 3128 next. Mechanical New member on-boarding and training has been completed. All new and existing members are now involved with projects such as development of a new pre-season chassis that serves as a test-bed for various items and hopefully as a prototyping drivetrain during build-season. Other projects exist too, such as the design of a new driver station, robot cart, and we also look to renovate our pit space at competitions. Controls The training of new members is still underway; we have taught them the Java basics (classes, methods, variables, enumerators, inheritance, etc) needed to succeed in this division. They are now in the process of learning about scripting their own code for a robot, and how to control it with a joystick. At the same time, the veteran members have been following pursuits in computer vision, state space control, and more. Business Our Business Department has been working very hard this preseason. Some of our projects so far include applying for grants, reaching out to companies, and training new members. We have doubled our department membership this year, which has allowed us to increase our productivity and expand our reach to more companies and organizations. We’ve submitted over 10 grant and sponsorship inquiries so far; we’ve received close to $25,000 with hopefully more to come. New member training has also been a major part of our preseason activities and the new members have been learning a lot about skills necessary to apply for grants and communicate with sponsors; these skills include writing formal emails or pitches, as well as speaking skills necessary for presenting pitches to companies. Strategy So far this preseason, Strategy has been focused mainly on training new members and experimenting with new game and data analysis methods. We have increased the size of the department twofold and have been simulating and studying past games to better understand what will come with the 2020 game, Infinite Recharge. Veteran members are experimenting with new methods of calculating cycle times and using statistics to better design our scouting & data systems. Marketing In Marketing, we have been working on getting new members situated with design software such as Inkscape and Adobe Illustrator. In fact, all the recent designs that have been featured on our Instagram story have been made by new members. We are also starting to plan out this year’s merchandise, a lineup which will include the traditional items such as hoodies and stickers, but also some exciting new items (psst… bucket hats!). There are also a number of sewing projects planned for the near future. Narwhals: If you want to buy merch, please DM @Arya or @Francesca on Slack! Past Outreach Last month, we attended Battle at the Border, and more recently, Solana Beach School District’s annual STREAM Fest. Huge thanks to Teams 1538 - The Holy Cows, Team 2485 - W.A.R. Lords, and Team 5025 - Pacific Steel for hosting the offseason event Battle at the Border! Our team had a blast playing Destination: Deep Space one last time with teams from California while training new members and helping them gain experience through different roles. We had an amazing time working with our alliance partners, Team PATRIBOTS 4738 and Team Paradox 2102! Team 3128 looks forward to attending next year’s BatB event. SBSD’s STREAM Fest was also fantastic! Thank you to Solana Beach School District for hosting the event and giving us the opportunity to spread the narwhal spirit! Team members new and old had fun improving their outreach skills while making an impact on the community. We taught kids how to program their own EV3 robot (parents: are your kids interested in STEM? Check out our summer camps here!)and how to feed cargo and hatch panels to Gromit. Again, thank you to SBSD; we hope to be at STREAM Fest again next year! And that’s all for now! Our next update will be at the start of build season, so we wish everyone an amazing holiday season! For more frequent updates, consider following us on Instagram at @3128aluminarwhals! |