westside story.

For our latest presentation we have to do a live preformace of westside story, with lego NXT's. I've never had the urge to be in a play before but I have attended a few and did got to look behind the scenes at one of my old highschools plays for the creation of promotional materials, I've always thought it would be awesome actualy seting up one skewed to my vision.

One of the biggest issues so far is the scale of the task, not so much the actual task but of the size of the group, how do you organise 9 different people to be the most effective. splitting people into smaller groups works well, but you cant control multiple groups at the same time

The most random question so far has definately to be "which ones going to be the girl?" seriously? which inanimate object which will all look the same will play the female role?

Judit raised an interesting point about leadership that its not always the most competent its usualy the most noisy who asumes leadership. although my counter argument is why raise a argument if the direction we seem to be going is the same. Is she the leader? prossibly she is the main noise maker. I make noise too though! like i've overheard othergroups disscussions and theres always someone who is the moderator of the disscussion (not even nessarily someone I'd pick to be a leader in one case) otherwise nothing gets done. whats the point of adding something if its going to be the same just with different syntax. if I dissagree with something I'll point it out, although the reason why we picked eachother to be in the same group is you can tell when working with someone is going to be succesfull. if i initated a mutiny it wouldn't acheive much"hey guys now i have the leader title we are going to do exactly the same thing as before. can you even mutiny on a collaborative project? group J feels in charge of the other 2 groups, did I seriously just go thourough a mental debate over is there a leader for that many paragraphs when i could have summed it up so easily as its a colaborative work.

The base design of our NXT's hasn't changed much although I have came up with a less wide version with my home NXT (on right), which will probably become our new base when I have access to BCT7's box of parts. Since it has extra clearance for the distance sensor to hang off the bottom.

Ive worked out its easier to name each NXT so theres no confusion between them. since thats one thing that was fustrating about the chess bot task where every NXT was called NXT on the bluetooth conectons so you had to guess which was yours.

we are now heading into the main stretch of this project with a large proprtion of the group making and decorating the set and working out lighting and another group working on the actual preformers it would be nice if it was finished by thursday morning so we have a whole day of final practice too troubleshoot anything that may/will arise most likely colour thresholds for placement markings.