Many teams choose to bring program printouts as a visual aid to show the design judges. If your team has created a design notebook to document the history of the robot evolution, it certainly makes a nice addition.

Different judges will use program printouts differently to generate questions for the team. They can certainly be helpful when talking about Programming Efficiency, and may be useful for the team in describing the other Programming topics as well.

Case study for coaches:

Sample design judge--SS

- SS is a programmer by career/hobby -- would probably enjoy talking programming with your team for 20-30 minutes--that's not going to happen

- SS wears bifocals -- may be slow to switch between looking at the team, looking at a book, and watching the robot demonstrate some programs

- SS is not an experienced Mindstorms programmer -- more likely to recognize patterns in a Mindstorms printout than spend time examining things step-by-step

Your team wants to be able to present its work to judges who are genuinely interested in what they've done and learned. They are interested in all three areas--Mechanical Design, Programming, and Strategy/Innovation. Many of them won't be programmers, and only a few will be able to examine all the details of your programming.

Your team members are proud and excited about what they've learned and done, but they won't have time to recount every decision over an 8-week season during a 10-minute interview.

Challenge them to describe what they've done overall, and identify what's interesting, what details are special. This is hard for some younger team members--they're focused on the step-by-step process, and haven't taken time to think about things from a "big picture" viewpoint.

Steve Scherr

VA/DC FLL Referee Advisor

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Tom Hafer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Surely we are not supposed to bring printouts of all the programs involved in this year’s mission? That would fill a small book

I didn’t see anything about that in the rules.

From: First Lego League in Virginia and DC [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Spalthoff
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 9:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: [VADCFLL-L] Help with printing programs

Another approach is to "break" the program blocks up and arrange them on the screen in a more reader-friendly configuration before printing. You can always use a pencil to connect the last block on the right to the first block on the left to show the flow. It's only for explanation purposes, so it's not a big deal that the program won't "run" that way - it's the content of the blocks that matters.

--Tom

Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 01:49:46 -0700
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VADCFLL-L] Help with printing programs
To: [log in to unmask]

As Rich Tate sugessted, use NXT's print to HTML file. This will produce a *.png file and if your program is very long it will be a long skinny image. If you open this into MS Word or PowerPoint you'll find it will either print to small for your to read or if it is readable it will truncate and not print the end of the program. Frustrating. Believe it or not, MS Excel does a very good job of printing the long skinny *.png files without the need to fuss over taking screenshots of each page. Open the file in Excel using the 'Insert Picture' and select the png file. Go to print preview and using page setup select "fit to" and set it to 3 or 4 pages wide (use whatever number makes it fit best) by 1 page high. You can fine-tune how the images are spread across the number of pages you select by changing the margins to your liking.

It's a bit non-intuitive to use a tool like Excel to print the images of NXT programs, but it is much faster than having to take individual screen shots of every page. To my knowledge, Excel is the only MS application that can deal with printing long and skinny images properly.

Pete Zulkarnain

On Wednesday, October 30, 2013 9:09 PM, Gina Willett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Can anyone tell me how to print out a program that uses 20+ blocks without it being so tiny that you can't hardly read it? I have tried everything!

Thanks in advance for your help!

Gina Willett

To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE your settings, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".
VADCFLL administrative announcements are sent via VADCFLL-ANNOUNCEMENTS-L. Visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-announcements-l.html to subscribe.

To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE your settings, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".
VADCFLL administrative announcements are sent via VADCFLL-ANNOUNCEMENTS-L. Visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-announcements-l.html to subscribe.

To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE your settings, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".
VADCFLL administrative announcements are sent via VADCFLL-ANNOUNCEMENTS-L. Visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-announcements-l.html to subscribe.