Meeting #2 - 10/26/08

We now have two meetings under out belt. For this second meeting we met at KI to avoid the animal dander in my house. I'm happy to report no allergy issues this week!

We worked on three main things at this meeting, the egg event, an instant challenge, and picking our main challenge. I'll start with the most successful and work to the least successful.

I was amazed at how well the team did with the egg event challenge. They brainstormed and built a device that seemed capable of safely catching the egg; even though we couldn't completely recreate the final event (a "dive" from 60 feet in the air) they attempted to simulate the forces the egg may see in this event and were generally successful. I won't go into the details of their catching device here; I'll reveal more after the egg event is over.

The teams first formal instant challenge also went well. They had to design and build a decorative structure for an imaginary nation, give a presentation about it, and then see how much weight it could hold. They had a very nice looking structure and presentation about it. Unfortunately it didn't hold a lot of weight. I used large rolls of tape for weight and it fell down when the first roll was place on it. We used this challenge as an opportunity to review some structural concepts, and basic Instant Challenge concepts. This was Grant's first real Instant Challenge. Overall the team did a nice job.

Our least successful task of the day came in working on selecting a main challenge. There are team members who are favoring challenge E which involves mainly building a lightweight structure that can hold as much weight as possible, this is a very pure technical challenge, and there are those that are favoring the improv challenge. Interestingly the challenges that offer the most diversity in tasks (i.e. involve writing, acting, designing, building, etc.) were quickly ruled out last week. Given the diversity of interests in the team members I think they may need to revisit these challenges to find one that makes all team members a little happy but nobody completely happy (in other words a compromise). I took some photos of the team doing their Instant Challenge today. Check out the photo album link if you want to view them. The scary looking chart was may attempt at classifying the challenges and the interest of team members. Tamera could not be at the meeting today but the team felt pretty comfortable in defining where her interests are; after Tamera has a chance to see the chart we'll see how well they really know her.

Meeting #1 - 10/19/08

Our first meeting is complete. It was a bit of a challenging meeting between schedule conflicts and allergies. We will be in search of a new meeting location after watching Ben struggle through being in our animal infested house. If anyone has any ideas for meeting locations let me know, I'll be looking into a couple of ideas this week.

We began narrowing our main challenge selection. We've basically eliminated two possibilities leaving three behind.

We also took a look at the rules for the egg event this year. There are some assignments for things to bring next week so we can do some eggxperimenting. Here is the list...

-Tamera is bringing eggs
-Erin is bringing a large bucket
-Katie is bringing some boxes
-Chloe is bringing balloons

This is Grant's first year doing DI so we also spent some time talking about some of the things involved in DI and played a brief round of a classic DI game called "what is it?".

Next week we will discuss challenge selections some more, work on testing some egg catching device concepts, and do at least one instant challenge. If you are curious to see the rules for this years egg event follow the link below.

http://www.stbernardgb.org/pdf/Team_Information_for_2008_2009_Egg_Event_ML.pdf