Southampton March Tech Day reflection

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hi everyone,

This is an email I meant to send a week ago, better late than never!

We've had the most successful tech-day in Southampton for a long time [1] last Saturday. It was the first one in a while which we managed to get a portion of the arena with carpet tiles for testing robots in, plus the venue was much nicer (Boldrewood building 177) photos are available [2].

We ran a quick survey for every attending team, all of the teams said they had a much better idea of how well/badly they were doing in comparison to other teams. They also said actually having similar carpet is a great idea for testing their robots. Of course there will also be the teams that have technical problems, but most of them can solve it themselves. This means Tech Days are still very useful, but teams only get an idea of how well they're doing if we get a large team turnout.

One idea that was raised was to have more Tech-Days further north, they suggested that some participating schools would be happy to offer themselves as a venue.

All teams loved the new venue, so we should totally keep using it, even if it is a pain to book. I think future Southampton tech days will be arranged around times the room is available from now on.

Social Media Interaction: we put our usual twitter feed screen up on the projector, but for some reason teams responded to it much more than usual, each team tweeted multiple times. Hopefully that contact continues after the tech day.

There were 2 things we could do to make it better:

1. Lay down a proper roll of carpet. We used the carpet tiles which were used for the old arena design. The big problem is they take ages to lay down and most of them have become damaged over the years. The simple solution is for Southampton to take and store the roll of carpet after the end of the competition this year!

2. Use a more well-built arena. Currently we had to bodge something with planks of wood and panels of plywood, it was relatively unstable and could have fallen if a robot drove into it. Again the easiest solution to this is to use the arena actually used in the competition (maybe take some to Southampton after the competition? we have the storage for it). It's very well built so I doubt it will be damaged if taken care of, it screws together quickly so we could get the arena ready earlier in the day.

Thanks,

Andy Barrett-Sprot

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days/Attendance

[2] See attachments

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Andy wrote:
> We've had the most successful tech-day in Southampton for a long time [1]
> last Saturday. It was the first one in a while which we managed to get a
> portion of the arena with carpet tiles for testing robots in, plus the venue
> was much nicer (Boldrewood building 177) photos are available [2].

Nice! Thanks for running the event and the write-up. It definitely
sounds like a success.

The photos and arena look good - you've done well to get such a great venue.

> We ran a quick survey for every attending team, all of the teams said they
> had a much better idea of how well/badly they were doing in comparison to
> other teams.

Great to hear. Do you have any ideas why this Tech Day was so much
better attended than the previous ones?

> One idea that was raised was to have more Tech-Days further north, they
> suggested that some participating schools would be happy to offer themselves
> as a venue.

How much further north are we talking? We already host Tech Days near
Oxford (and of course in London), and the comments I get there are
similar -- that it's great not to have to go all the way to
Southampton. Incidentally there's another one at RAL in a couple of
weeks, I'll see about sending out a reminder shortly.

Do you think we need to investigate hosting something another hour or
so's travel north? Warwick perhaps?
I've lost track of the teams geographies to know if this is worth
doing. Did anyone put together a teams map this year?

> Social Media Interaction: we put our usual twitter feed screen up on the
> projector, but for some reason teams responded to it much more than usual,
> each team tweeted multiple times. Hopefully that contact continues after the
> tech day.

Cool, do you think this is something which other Tech Days would
benefit from doing? If so, could you add the details of this to the
relevant trac page [A]?

> There were 2 things we could do to make it better:

> *taking things after the competition*

These seem reasonable, though I would note that there are other means
to mock-up an arena which may be even more portable and easier to
deploy; more on that in another thread I've been meaning to write for
a while.

Given that we threw away the carpet last year, I don't see any reason
you couldn't take it. You would of course need to actually have a way
of transporting it!

Thanks,
Peter

[A] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days
[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/wiki/Tech%20Days/Attendance

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

Those photos look great, great work and thanks for putting all that
effort in! It'd be amazing if all tech days were like this, although I
imagine that's a lot of work.

How many teams turned up, do you think any of them require large
quantities of attention from mentors in the next month?

Peter wrote:
> Do you think we need to investigate hosting something another hour or
> so's travel north? Warwick perhaps?
> I've lost track of the teams geographies to know if this is worth
> doing. Did anyone put together a teams map this year?

[0] Was accurate circa middle of november.

Andy wrote:
> 1. Lay down a proper roll of carpet. We used the carpet tiles which
> were used for the old arena design. The big problem is they take ages
> to lay down and most of them have become damaged over the years. The
> simple solution is for Southampton to take and store the roll of
> carpet after the end of the competition this year!

No reason not to do that: however the carpet rolls are 4M long. It's
entirely feasible to cut it up and transport it, naturally it doesn't
look as good as normal arena, but it should be close enough. Storage is
another matter.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zOXQEMHWaMqg.kgPGjy1ex7ds

--
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I wrote:
>> Do you think we need to investigate hosting something another hour or
>> so's travel north? Warwick perhaps?
>> I've lost track of the teams geographies to know if this is worth
>> doing. Did anyone put together a teams map this year?

Jeremy wrote:
> [0] Was accurate circa middle of november.

Shiny, thanks. It looks like Bedford is somewhat central for a
reasonable number of north-ish teams (Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby),
though all at quite a large distance. Do we have anyone based in that
area who could pick this up for next year, and/or could the Bedford
School team host perhaps?

Thanks,
Peter

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zOXQEMHWaMqg.kgPGjy1ex7ds

[Tom Leese]

Hi,

> On 27 Mar 2016, at 17:13, Andrew Barrett-Sprot <abarre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> One idea that was raised was to have more Tech-Days further north, they suggested that some participating schools would be happy to offer themselves as a venue.

I believe the team that requested this was Mirfield Grammar (MFG) and I remember them saying (albeit in a jokey context, so I don’t know if they were 100% serious) that they would be interested in being the host to a tech day.

Tom

[Jeremy Morse]

Hi,

On 27/03/16 18:20, Peter Law wrote:
> Shiny, thanks. It looks like Bedford is somewhat central for a
> reasonable number of north-ish teams (Oxford, Cambridge, Rugby),
> though all at quite a large distance. Do we have anyone based in that
> area who could pick this up for next year, and/or could the Bedford
> School team host perhaps?

Bedford School is a boarding school so IMO they have the capability and
capacity; it's unclear if they have the will though. I guess I can have
a chat with the teacher at the competition.

> I believe the team that requested this was Mirfield Grammar (MFG) and
> I remember them saying (albeit in a jokey context, so I don’t know if
> they were 100% serious) that they would be interested in being the
> host to a tech day.

Well, there were going to be 3 northern teams this year (UVH dropped
out) and Joe Hacker is in the north, so it's not a 100% infeasible
suggestion. They likely weren't being completely serious though, they do
spent _many_ hours driving back and forth for SR.

--
Thanks,
Jeremy