Built Different Updates!

At this point in the semester, our Freshman MRDC team decided on a name – “Built Different” – which for some reason seemed to grow on everybody. After two general meetings just getting to know each other over zoom, Sub-team leads were elected and club members joined Sub-teams of interest. Myself and the sub-team leads were able to get into the ESPL, explore, and take an general inventory of what parts we’d be inheriting from the Senior team. Since then, we’ve had two sets of sub-team meetings, where on one week the meetings are focused on teaching material in programming, electrical, and mechanical, and the next week is focused on applying that material in projects. Currently, we have two main projects: the CAD team is learning Autodesk Inventor through the design of a catapult, and programming/electrical is learning Arduino and rapid prototyping through online simulation software called Tinkercad. Just recently, myself and the sub-team leads have discussed how to best spend our SORF money considering the confusion surrounding the state of the competition for the following semester. Regardless, we have several plans for the following weeks and the next semester. First, we will continue with our projects in CAD and Arduino, which will develop a strong foundation for us to apply knowledge come competition season. One google forms survey sent out by our programming lead found that a majority of our club members are interested in Computer Vision, so we will be forming a computer vision group and starting some projects soon. We will also continue to get active membership points to qualify for ESPL access next semester. We are all very excited to work together and actually build projects, but until then, we will make as much online progress as we can.