The weeks leading up the the Festival, planned for the 7th of August, were a whirlwind of preparation. Between brainstorming ideas, coordinating with the festival’s manager, and designing our booth, we had a lot to accomplish in a limited amount of time. It wasn’t much of a contribution with the fact that I was away in Houston for a summer camp during the majority of the preparation time. However, we didn’t allow this to decrease the quality of our performance. An idea that had been in the air for a while was programming a dance for our robot. The concept was reasonable, for our robot had a head like facet and two beacons that resembled arms. The “dance team”, Sierrah, Audrey, Helena, and myself, collaborated through Google Hangouts and Slack in order to communicate and finalize the song, dance outline, and coding. We also communicated with the rest of the team, assigning each member a job and a set shift to work at the festival.
The day of the festival, the whole team arrived at our booth early in order to set up and test all of our equipment. As a mock playing field/stage, laying foam onto wet grass wasn’t the smartest idea, Timothy, Kyle, Leonard, and Marlon laid two large wooden boards to act as a playing field. Both the dance and the driving lessons would take place on the platform in front of our booth. Along with the dance program, we all had decided to bring and set up a speaker, to play music for the dance; a banner, showcasing our team; a building station, for children to experiment and be introduced to hardware; as well as a set smaller robots that were programmed to do certain tasks. After all, it was a kids’ festival. We wanted to cater our booth to appeal to the majority of our guests. When there were 15 minutes to officially opening the festival, several spectators had already started to drift in, we had a final team discussion officializing roles before splitting and beginning our long day.
Within the very few minutes of opening, our booth was swarmed with curious children and their lingering parents. We answered several questions regarding our team, the FTC competition itself, and the functionality of our robot. At first, we struggled with being articulate in our descriptions and ended up confusing many of the parents that were interested in our organization. However, throughout the day, we all became more comfortable more experienced with giving thorough and clear explanations.
The building stations was a big hit and we constantly had children occupying the slots. We provided basic nuts and bolts, metal bars, simple wheels, and basic tools such as wrenches and screwdrivers. Kids were allowed to build any structure they wished under the guidance of a team member at the station. Our original schedule for the day was to run our dance every 30 minutes, however we realized that having this schedule left strange gaps. To solve this, we divided members apart of the building station and sent them to teach kids how to drive our robot. This was a huge hit and we had eager children lining up to drive our robot. When it came to the dance, initially, we completely underestimated how engaging it was going to be. Going into it, we had expected just a couple families to gather around. To our surprise, we attracted crowds of people who were utterly fascinated with what we had done. Over all, the dance was a complete success. We had rounds after rounds of running the dance, each time earning applause and an occasional call for an encore. The schedule to run the dance was every half and hour. This was because it gave us time to interact with the visitors as well as fixing any problems that surfaced throughout the festival. For example, we thought we came with enough batteries, only to realize, as we approached the final hours of the festival, we were running short on power. The last round of running the dance was more so of a disaster, for the battery ran out a quarter of the way through the dance. The music continued to play but the robot didn’t move whatsoever, confusing many of our spectators.