Presentation Prep-Run

By Anisha and Bhanaviya

Task: Practice the presentation prior to the PvC Scrimmage on Saturday

Iron Reign will be participating in our first competitive event of the year at the PvC scrimmage. One of the submissions we needed for this scrimmage was a recorded version of our judged presentation. A stark contrast to previous seasons, the virtual nature of this year required us to be less extemperaneous at least when it came to presentations like this. We started out by building the actual presentation for this year and then assigning slides. Another difference was that our robot wasn't actually complete - since we were more used to building presentations for qualifiers, we usually do not anticipate the need to create a presentation with an unfinished robot (but there's a first time for everything!). As such, we needed to focus our presentation on the iterative nature of our design and on our future plans as the season progresses.

Next, we needed to gather the whole team to run the presentation. Another significant difference was how we actually ran the presentation. In past years, we would meet in-person to practice the presentation but this year, all we needed was to find a time to meet virtually to make it happen. One downside to this is that usually, we provide our judges prototypes of our earlier designs and unorthodox materials considered for the final design (oven mitts, ice-sube trays, etc.) but with the virtual format, this is no longer a possibility. On the other hand, this means that our live robot demonstration is no longer limited to the constraints of a judging room. Since we have access to our field while we present, we can show our audience our robot in action by making full use of the game elements such as the goal posts.

Next Steps

Overall, we were able to successfully record our presentation. While timing is something we need to be mindful of, we expect to fine-tune this as the season progresses along with our actual presentation itself.