Journal

Day 1 (Friday 11 July)

Today is our first day in doing robotics. Some of our members went to the Science Center, as they had to listen to the briefing on the competition. After that, they were given two different missions. Our members just took those two-mission map quickly as it was so crowded. They did not check the mission map, as they had no time to do so. When they reached school, they realized that they took two missions that were identical instead of two missions that were supposed to be different. They had to inform the science center about it. We discussed and brainstormed about the first mission. We also had to make up our group name. So in the end we came up with the name “LOS EXTREME”. This group name means the extreme. It shows us that we have the characteristic of being extreme.

Day 2 (Friday 18 July)

The second day, we had a robotic training. Our instructor, Mr. Mok, taught us how to program the robot. We were divided into groups and had to work together to make the robot move. We were taught the basic of programming.

Day 3 (Tuesday 15 July)

The next day, we brainstormed on the first mission. We constructed and brainstormed the robot and the collection of buoys. We installed the mindstorm from the Robolab Programming CD. At that moment, we began to start creating our website.

 

Day 4 (Friday 25 July)

The following day, we had a discussion on how to collect the buoys and dropping of the buoys. We had a lot of ideas but did not know which to choose. We contributed a lot of ideas but at last we chose one. It took us a while to decide on the ideas. On that day itself, we continued on with our website.

 

Day 5 (Tuesday 29 July)

Four days later, we finally decided to start programming the robot. Some of the members continued to design the website. We separated our work equally. Today we faced three problems. When we were in the middle of programming, some confusion arose. The problem was that the robot kept turning around and around. It will not follow the program that was installed in it. The next problem was that when we were about to save the website inside the diskette, out of a sudden, the monitor said that they could not save the program. At the end, we lost some pages of the website. We were so frustrated that we almost decided to give up but we pulled up our strength. Lastly, the motor of the robot could not work but to our luck, it turned out well.

 

Day 6 (Thursday 31 July)

We started all over again on the website. We faced many problems during that session mainly because we could not focus well. We had a few problems when we were programming and constructing. We had problems collecting the buoys and we could not follow the black trail. Our website’s font is too small and we are having difficulty adjusting it.

 

Day 7 (Tuesday 5 August)

We dismantled the robot all over again as we are trying to improve on it more. The previous robot was not working well. We took our group photos and each individual’s photo. This photos are meant to be paste into the website under “Photo Album" but we could not load the picture into the site so we decided not to put "Photo Album" in the site.

Day 8 (Wednesday 13 August)

The next week, we continued on our program and construction. It was going quite well and we had no problem on it.

Day 9 (Thursday 14 August)

Our former instructor, Mr Samuel Chee, came today at around 3.00 pm to help us out. He demonstrated his own robot and we were completely impressed. He could construct it in only a few minutes. We can’t even do the construction in a few minutes. We were totally amused. He also taught us how to program and construct properly and creatively. It was a good opportunities for us to have the help by our instructor.

 

Day 10 (Friday 15 August)

Today, Hadijah had problems in designing the web page as she has ran out of ideas. However, she went around asking the others for ideas on designing it. We managed to get some ideas.