2023 Masterpiece

Meet the Team

Bjorn, Kieran, Matthew, Zach, Michael, Ari, Lucy, Jayden, Henry

Innovation Project

Project title and theme: "Making Music Available to EVERYONE"
Problem identified: People don't have enough money to start learning music sometimes. Instruments are really expensive and it's hard to start learning if you don't have access to the instrument.
Solution developed: We designed a prototype for an app that would connect people with instruments that they could borrow or rent.
Research and community impact: We researched the cost of instruments and places we could host this service. We think involving high school and college students who could get college credit for working on the project could take care of most of the costs and we would get donations of old instruments and money from organizations. We surveyed middle schoolers to see if this is something that would help them if they wanted to learn a new instrument. We want to remove barriers to entry into music.

masterpiece Innovation Project

Robot Game

Strategy for the robot game started right away. We prioritized the easier missions (anything involving a push), medium missions (lift) and then hard (multi step, push/pull/gears)

We programmed 6 missions with python coding. Bjorn and Matthew did most of the coding work. and Zach and Kieran did a lot of the building and attachments work.

The start of the season we all made 3 of the same robot to test out some block coding and then we decided we didn't like that design at all and made one from scratch.

Our robot was designed with a lot of stability and has 2 places where we can attach moving geared attachments.

Coding was done in python because Matthew and Bjorn already knew some python and they were excited to try it out this year.

Core Values

We made up our team name together, "Birds Aren't Real" We all thought it was funny when the MC at the regional event announced our name.
Our favorite team building moment was when we all helped build the mission models for the season.
We tried to include all members in our team, but we found out how hard the core value inclusion is!!

Season Highlights

This was our team's rookie year.
We scored our top score of 165 points at our regional event in Woodbury, MN at the middle school.
We worked really good as a team by the end of the season and we overcame a lot of team issues.
One of our missions (holographic performer) was setup wrong all season and we didn't realize it until we got to our regionals event! So we needed to recode it, but it was too late.
We organized our legos on our new lego organizer bins!! SO COOL. now we won't step on the legos and injur ourselves.

Season Reflection

This was really fun and we are proud to get this far this season (our first year!)
What we learned is having a large team can be harder than a smaller team to make sure everyone is doing a job and is focused.
Next year we really want to start building our main robot quicker. It took a lot of time to make a design that we stuck on.
Python coding was good, but also really difficult for everyone else to learn about. So maybe we should all take a class on python at the start of the season or just do block coding
We had only 2 people really focus on the innovation project. This was not a very good idea because the judges are always going to make sure that ALL team members are involved in all parts of the innovation project, coding, design, and robot game. Everyone needs to do the work.
We relied a lot of the gyroscope of our robot and it ended up glitching out at the regional event. We should learn more about gyroscope troubleshooting and also make a plan B in case this would happen again.
Next year out goal is to advanced to sectionals! Either by doing good on the robot game score or doing good on the innovation project.

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