(no subject)
Our preformance yesterday was awsome! We were expecting to have a crowd of about 50 because EVERYONE knows Mrs.A but we ended up with about 150!!!! Mum, Dad and their respective partners came out to watch.
Poor Joel was up until 4:00am the night before programing his vehicle but the results were spectacular. He was also judging one of the problems and since he was practicing with us the night before he had to go in early the day of to set up the competition site for his problem. I wanted a ride to the school so I said I'd get up early and help him set up if he'd give me a ride so he and his girlfriend picked me up the morning of the tournament. We (including g/f) moved desks and chairs out of four class rooms in record time.
So there are 5 courses and we get points for compleeting steps of each course (defeating the obstical, crossing the finish line, hitting baloon holder, poppoing balloon). Through out it all we have a play going on (complete with live music) which we have to improve quite a bit in to react to how the vehicles are running.
The first course Mrs.A runs with her elastic powered vehcile and it did everything except pop the balloon. The crowd "awwwww" ed for us and everything. But there's a 8 min time limit and we'd gotten 2/3 of the points for that course so we moved on to give outselves enough time to do the other 4.
The second course the vehicle has to go out, around a block of wood, and then to the finish line. Joel's vehicle has an on board computer which contols the wheel rotations. When it gets to the right point in it's programming it turns the wheels in opposite directions and the vehicle spins in place. The whole process is very slow though and the effect is to make it more dramatic. So his vehcile lumbers out to the block of wood and then spins neatly in place and the audience goes "oooooooooh". It was great! Also, they were laughing at our jokes in the play! Yay! The vehicle even poped the balloon. Flawless.
The third course (also run by Joel's vehicle) the vehicle has to go out and come back and pop a balloon that was originally placed behind it. So the vehicle goes out, comes back, hit's the balloon holder, and doesn't pop the balloon. The audience gave us a very heartfelt "awwwwwwww". But Joel looked up at them and raised a scolding finger with a 'ah-ah, we're not done yet' manner because of course, this vehicle has a sharpened screw mounted on the front that it can stab the balloon with but it's programed on a delay. So a second later POP! Everyone was so happy! Mrs. A and I totally dropped out of character but no one noticed. I had to wait for the cheering to die down so I could say my lines!
Joel's vehicle also does the fourth course but we ran into trouble with it. Two things happened, first the course was not set up correctly - it needs to be accurate to the milimeter for our vehicle to work and second the cups were a different height than the ones we programmed with, which we had tried to anticipate but our fail safe wasn't good enough. Anyway, we were still on a high and running out of time so we went straight to the last one.
The final one is supposed to climb a set of stairs but if one reads the rules closely one discovers that the whole thing doesn't have to climb the stairs, just parts of it. So only half our vehicle climbs the stairs. It makes the first and last courses very simmilar if you remove the stairs from the equation and we encountered the same problem. The elastic vehicle ran the course and did everything except pop the balloon. Except that by that time we knew how much time we had left. We ran it a second time and poped the balloon (much cheering!) and even almost managed to get off most our last few lines of style before the judges called time. There was much cheering :)
I was really happy with how we preformed the play too. We did a good job filling in the gaps with improve and shortening the script where we had to hurry up.
Yay for us!
And today I work up really sore and just couldn't figure out why... and then I remembered the four classrooms of desks and chairs. I'd feel sorry for Joel too but my guess is he's just not going to wake up today at all.
Poor Joel was up until 4:00am the night before programing his vehicle but the results were spectacular. He was also judging one of the problems and since he was practicing with us the night before he had to go in early the day of to set up the competition site for his problem. I wanted a ride to the school so I said I'd get up early and help him set up if he'd give me a ride so he and his girlfriend picked me up the morning of the tournament. We (including g/f) moved desks and chairs out of four class rooms in record time.
So there are 5 courses and we get points for compleeting steps of each course (defeating the obstical, crossing the finish line, hitting baloon holder, poppoing balloon). Through out it all we have a play going on (complete with live music) which we have to improve quite a bit in to react to how the vehicles are running.
The first course Mrs.A runs with her elastic powered vehcile and it did everything except pop the balloon. The crowd "awwwww" ed for us and everything. But there's a 8 min time limit and we'd gotten 2/3 of the points for that course so we moved on to give outselves enough time to do the other 4.
The second course the vehicle has to go out, around a block of wood, and then to the finish line. Joel's vehicle has an on board computer which contols the wheel rotations. When it gets to the right point in it's programming it turns the wheels in opposite directions and the vehicle spins in place. The whole process is very slow though and the effect is to make it more dramatic. So his vehcile lumbers out to the block of wood and then spins neatly in place and the audience goes "oooooooooh". It was great! Also, they were laughing at our jokes in the play! Yay! The vehicle even poped the balloon. Flawless.
The third course (also run by Joel's vehicle) the vehicle has to go out and come back and pop a balloon that was originally placed behind it. So the vehicle goes out, comes back, hit's the balloon holder, and doesn't pop the balloon. The audience gave us a very heartfelt "awwwwwwww". But Joel looked up at them and raised a scolding finger with a 'ah-ah, we're not done yet' manner because of course, this vehicle has a sharpened screw mounted on the front that it can stab the balloon with but it's programed on a delay. So a second later POP! Everyone was so happy! Mrs. A and I totally dropped out of character but no one noticed. I had to wait for the cheering to die down so I could say my lines!
Joel's vehicle also does the fourth course but we ran into trouble with it. Two things happened, first the course was not set up correctly - it needs to be accurate to the milimeter for our vehicle to work and second the cups were a different height than the ones we programmed with, which we had tried to anticipate but our fail safe wasn't good enough. Anyway, we were still on a high and running out of time so we went straight to the last one.
The final one is supposed to climb a set of stairs but if one reads the rules closely one discovers that the whole thing doesn't have to climb the stairs, just parts of it. So only half our vehicle climbs the stairs. It makes the first and last courses very simmilar if you remove the stairs from the equation and we encountered the same problem. The elastic vehicle ran the course and did everything except pop the balloon. Except that by that time we knew how much time we had left. We ran it a second time and poped the balloon (much cheering!) and even almost managed to get off most our last few lines of style before the judges called time. There was much cheering :)
I was really happy with how we preformed the play too. We did a good job filling in the gaps with improve and shortening the script where we had to hurry up.
Yay for us!
And today I work up really sore and just couldn't figure out why... and then I remembered the four classrooms of desks and chairs. I'd feel sorry for Joel too but my guess is he's just not going to wake up today at all.