After last year's Pi Wars was cancelled, we were all excited that Pi Wars was going to happen this year, even though virtually this time. In reality the feeling of our team was half-excited, half-stressed, because we live so far apart which meant meetings would be tricky, especially with Covid travel restrictions.
But then Covid worked on our side (for once!). Because most of the competitors of Pi Wars are schools, and school was cancelled, the Virtual Pi Wars deadline was moved from March to June. It would have been a struggle to get all our videos in by March, but we had already started meeting virtually, so we got the upper hand continuing to work (even in little bits) through lockdown.
I was lucky to have the robot and the Lego at my house so we could actively build and test things, and usually spent our meetings brainstorming ideas for controls or attachments.
Because we are able to meet so rarely, we had to start recording our videos as early as possible. We've really been able to see the effects of starting early as we come closer to competition time.
Our first meeting on Easter weekend (right after the restrictions were lifted) was mostly a lot of testing - we made a placeholder fishbowl, and tried the toy stacker, and tested the controls, and even tried the Google AIY.
We learned from that day that nothing ever goes as smoothly as you think, so we made a plan to record at least one video every time we met after that.
Our second meeting was on April 24. We recorded Feed the Fish and also tried to record Garden Path but it didn't work as well.
Our third meeting on May 9 we built the Obstacle Course, recorded it and took it apart.
Our most recent meeting on May 23 we recorded both the Tidy The Toys challenge and a better run of the Garden Path challenge.
And in between all that, we wrote and individually recorded our Technical and Artistic Merit video.
Since we were smart about the time we we likely to have together only every two weeks, we've been able to make steady pace with our 'robot schedule' without being stressed or worried about not finishing on time.
We may even get together one more time to see if we can get better times!
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