Hello all! It’s been a while. 

    As you know, it’s been quite a hectic year. Both Avalon and GRS are meeting virtually, although Great River allows some students to learn somewhat in-person, socially distanced. Of course, this also means that the robotics team is meeting virtually. Until recently, build team had been doing some meetings in-person to work on the robot, but we decided last week that the COVID numbers were getting too high, so build transitioned to virtual meetings. 

    Despite the pandemic, NoMythic has still been recruiting new team members. We had a virtual open house in early October, and after the recruitment process, our team has 20 students, 11 of whom are new. We are enjoying working with these new recruits and welcoming them onto the team.

    The programming team has also been doing some notable work since quarantine began. Recently, they have been teaching new members the basics of a programming language called python. Each team member has received a lego based robot, called a SPIKE Prime, and they are using their python-programming skills to program it to move. 

    As for operations, we have been hard at work on many projects, but have mainly been adapting our sponsor presentation so that we can present it virtually during the pandemic, and have been giving it to companies looking to sponsor NoMythic. Additionally, we worked hard on the recruitment process earlier this fall.

    The captain’s team has been meeting weekly to make decisions, plan meetings, work out schedules, and keep the team on track. The captain’s team is made up of students and mentors, and the students were selected for their positions this spring. In addition to logistical work, the captain’s team has been improving our leadership skills by reading books and discussing them together. So far, they’ve read Joy Inc. by Richard Sheridan and Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. 

    Recently, NoMythic had a virtual team retreat, where we got to know each other, played games, and made goals for this year.

A few weeks ago, we registered with FIRST, and we are looking forward to our upcoming season!

This Tuesday and Thursday we did Mock Kickoff! The game: Rebound Rumble from 2012. After watching the game animation together, we read the rules, then split up into small groups to discuss scoring and game play. Each group created three possible robot profiles. When we came back on Thursday, each robot was assigned a student driver and we played our new Robot Paper Game, an RPG in which you roll dice to attempt moves and each robot has modifiers for their strengths. After that we sat down as a team to decide what robot we wanted to make. After a long discussion, we all walked out of the room on the same page about our plans for the (hypothetical) season!

If you’re interesting in learning more about the game we used, watch the 2012 game animation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYWscqruBRA

Our team visited the MURA practice field this week. Our drivers were able to do time trials on a fairly realistic field, and we got to visit with our friends at the Firebears and Ultraviolet. Thank you to Herobotics and others for organizing this space!

So much is getting done! Right now Kelli, Sam, and Lex are working on bumpers (pictures 1 + 2); Ethan and Zo are milling pieces for the robot (pic 3); Nick and Emilio are working on the chassis (pic 4); Robert, Sean, and Brad are working on pneumatics (pic 5); Wesley, Lando, Connor, Anna, Elizabeth, Henry, Lukas, and Mark are all working on electronics (pic 6); and, last but not least, Alex and Noah are CADing (pic 7).  Good work, teams!