Team Meeting - 3 November

This was a full day meeting. It was so busy, that Carol is doing today's diary for us.

We looked at the Shockwatch temperature gauges that Anthony had sent us - he had be very generous in how many he sent us - amazing! We tried some of them out in the sun, and pulled a couple apart to see how they worked. They are activated by pulling a tag. Inside they have something that works a bit like litmus paper, and the dye moves through the paper as the temperature is reached for different lengths of time.

Annabelle and her mum had taken some great photos of their chicken dinner from last night. And Carol had just visited the New World to get some photos of packets of chicken for us to use in our display. We all cropped and enhanced the photos in iPhoto and then put them into Pages where we used the instant alpha tool to remove the backgrounds. We started printing some of the photos. Some we will use for props in our Skit for the Presentation.

We practised our skit and made a good start with the first part which shouldn't take much more than a minute. We need to work a lot on the second stage of the skit, where the chicken is taken home from the supermarket and cooked. Several of us have props we need to bring to school as soon as possible. Some props we'll make out of cardboard.

Oliver will take a lead role in the third part where we explain the problem we chose to work on, and our innovative solution.

Some of us worked some more on our programming, and Annabelle, Jasmine and Alice created titles and headings for our Display. Jasmine made great progress with her flow chart, especially after the conference call we had later. Annabelle wrote some more for the pamphlet, and added some photos. We did a test print to see how the colours were looking. This needs to be ready for our Outreach to the supermarket next week on Wednesday afternoon. An Outreach group of 4 students will go to this with Carol. After school that same day, Carol will take the 4 key programmers to Russley School for a practice on their table.

Jasmine was brave and made a conference call to a couple of chicken farms to check the stages the chickens go through from egg until they are sent to the Tegel factory.

Annabelle also had a quick conference call to her dad, Pete Barrowclough, and we asked if he thought our innovative idea might be a good one, and he gave us some great suggestions of other questions we need to ask to see if our idea is acceptable with people like Tegal.

Towards the end of the afternoon Carol got us to put all the programmed missions on one computer for Oliver to put together. Then they were downloaded to the Robot (will it be called Boomerang?). We did a test run on the table as if it was the competition. This was very worthwhile because we found the robot did some weird things, like go backwards instead of forwards! And one programme hadn't downloaded. And we still have another to add. Jake kept score on the iPad!

Then we had a 15 minute Team Challenge with straws and cellotape. Carol split us into 3 groups to see how different people worked together. It was great fun!

Gee, what a busy day! But, only 2 days left to get everything done...