How to Make a Suit Bots Promote Award Video

In order to make a Suit Bots Promote Award video, there are some steps you ought to follow.

Step 1
Choose a theme for the video.  Generally, Hollywood directors have this figured out, we chose the trailer from Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, Dr. Strangelove.

Step 2
Plan the video.  Write a script, make a screenplay, there’s all sorts of fun stuff you can do for this part.  This step is vital, as it will make everything go smoother.  We forgot to write a list of shots that we needed to take, so what could have been one day of filming ended up being two because the person calling the shots said he had the shots he needed, when actually he didn’t.

Step 3
Plan your time.  Deadlines are always very important, they give you a sense of urgency.  “Oh dear, I have english homework due tomorrow!”  Choose days where your writing and screenplays will be finished, choose days to do filming, a day where all the editing will be completed (one week before a competition is usually what’s asked).

Step 4
Film.  You’ve ought to have already planned your shots, so this step should be straightforward.

Step 5
Edit.  If you have a Mac, iMovie works very well.  Otherwise, you might want to consider getting a favor from a friend who has a Mac.  If you want to pay more than the cost of an operating system, there’s also Adobe Premier, though it’s quiet expensive.  Editing, though is quiet fun.

The Inspire Award

Today, January 12, 2013, we the Suitbots have received the Inspire Award at the Antelope Valley FTC Qualifier.  This is an amazing achievement for us as a team.  Our goal this year was to do our best to be the team to inspire all of the others, and we have succeeded.  We hope that receiving this award will inspire other teams to follow in our footsteps and be an inspiring team.  Just to be labeled as a model of an ideal team that other teams can look up to is the best reward of all.  We will use this amazing experience and honor to drive us to continue to do our best at all of the future competitions and hopefully make it to St. Louis by doing well at the LA FTC Championships in March.

Presentation at Bradoaks Elementary

Attendance


    • Mark
    • Evan
    • Hunter
    • Chris
    • Dante
    • Erik
    • Fletcher

Journal


Tasks

  • Present our program and robot in an interesting way to the kids
  • Get them excited about robotics to join in high school

Reflections

Today we got a new cart for our robot to hold it and all of our boxes and parts.  We went straight to Bradoaks elementary school to share our robotics program with the GATE (honors) students there.  It went very well.  All of the kids were excited and we did a before and after poll for who thought they may want to be in robotics in high school and there were many more after than before.  We let them drive the robot and talked about robotics in general, about all of its good, helpful qualities and how much fun it is as well as all of the hard work that goes into it.  Since we didn’t get to work on the robot today we will finish working on it tomorrow.


Google Drive for Saving the Files

Recently, Google added to their great fleet of web services Google drive, which is a cloud-based hard drive for everyone to use.  Having a Google account buys you 5GB of space in the drive, but what can you use it for?

Our team is fortunate enough to have three computers at our disposal, each of which with its own RobotC license.  One problem we have been encountering during our build season is being on one computer, but that computer doesn’t have the TeleOp we were working with the other day.  This is where Google Drive comes in.  We installed it on each of our computers and concatenated each program file into one “Suit Bots Programs” folder, so now each of our computers has the latest of all the software files and its list will be updated every time we update one of the programs.