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In the previous season, after we failed to reach Nationals, Andrew volunteered at the Nationals tournament. Andrew, Tim and Iain all helped in the lead up to the season, along with some parents and Ben to renovate and tidy up where our FLL team met, and after reaching a state of usability, we began to meet.
Each meeting, our coach would give us an activity to do as a team, which would help develop our Core Values, and telling us how to improve to be a better team and work together better.
In our first meeting, we did a team building activity in which we went around in a circle, introducing ourselves, the school we went to, and something we did for fun.
In the second week, we had 2 sets of Lego, with one being de-constructed, and one being made. We had to create 2 identical sets, and had reasonable success with the first few models, but once they started getting more complicated, we didn't have the same success. We did have reasonable success at letting everyone participate equally, but it could have been better.
In the third week, we had a blindfold applied to everyone, and were told to navigate from point a to point b, across a yard with obstacles. We used our knowledge of where we were going and where we knew obstacles to be to navigate across the yard. We didn't have as much group participation, but some people were in positions covered by others. We could have improved upon our teamwork though.
In the fourth week, we were split into two groups, and given 2 sets of Duplo, which is a form of large Lego. We were given two minutes to strategise in our small groups before building something using the Duplo we were given, independently of the other group. After building it for two minutes, we were told to explain our decisions. Both groups performed reasonably well, but one of them didn't include Aaryan during the explanation.
Instead of a regular meeting, we went to the FLL Challenge Kick-off in the fifth week, which obviously meant that we couldn't run a core values activity. While eating lunch, Andrew decided to start a game of tips, so that the team could release some stress, move around and also become more connected. Eventually, the team also convinced the three parents to join in, and so the very disappointing and slow game of tips unfolded, increasing team connections, and bringing everyone onto an even platform, as prior to this, while the new members were doing RoboCamp, to bring them into the fold, the new members had been building Boxer V2.2, which meant that the two sub-sections of the team weren't very interconnected, leading to some friction and awkwardness in previous team building exercises.
Between the Kick-Off and 11/10/24, we did Core Values activities such as more tips, replicating build models, building models without preparation, building gear shafts, building how we would show our team showing the Core Values, and a few others. Mainly, the feedback was that we weren't communicating enough, working more as individuals, without checking with others.
Although we needed to develop most of our Core Values, we enjoyed most meetings, as we would talk and sometimes end up talking about very fun things, such as "On a scale of one to T-Rex, how would you rate your day?" or how "The weather intentionally spited us for a term.".
For our core values activity on 11/10/24, we were given a stack of paper with 1-2 words on each, and were told to create the Core Values from memory. We did so with reasonable success, and did improve on our teamwork and communication, although we were less inclusive in the second half of it, since it became a much simpler task which we focused on.
Core Values Activities were put on hold after this as we only had a few weeks left until the tournament, but we aimed to help each other throughout and build our relationships with one another. This was done by splitting into different people that were "experts" in each section of FLL. Iain and Caleb were project intensive, and Andrew and Tim were code intensive. Aaryan, Meek and Muse worked on their specific attachments for missions, while Iain and Caleb would "steal" people in order for them to catch up on what was happening in the Innovation Project. The same happened in reverse, where Iain and Caleb would be stolen in order to hear on progress on the Robot Game and the code associated with it.
Iain and Caleb, in order to do this, had to finish their missions that they were completing, so Iain had completed M01 and M02, while Caleb completed M09. They then were project intensive throughout the remaining meetings that they had, but others could work on researching and other stuff associated with the Innovation Project out of meetings, which was something that is shown here:
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