Red Tape

Today we were instructed about all these restrictions that well, I can no longer say the institutions name that said we are not allowed to do a bunch of things. All these restrictions remind got me thinking about the restrictions we also faced in robotics. Besides the fact that both are related to technology, both are new things at, (shoot, I cannot complete my sentence) my school. The new idea of using a blog for school work is a very different way of learning just as robotics is a very different activity than other clubs and sports. We have run into trouble on many things because the old rules that this school set up are difficult to follow with our new club. One such thing was our website. On this website we mentioned this institutions name, which we were not suppose to do. We face the same restriction in composition. on our website we also spoke about sponsors. This is a major violation of my schools rules but the rule poses a challenge. In order to talk about donations now we have to tell the people who want to donate, that they have to donate it to the school, and then have the money directed toward us.
Another issue we face with finances is purchasing supplies. this is probably one of the rules we have broken many times. The usual procedures for purchasing things for reimbursement requires our mentors to create a request slip, send it to some office to get it approved so that we can hear from them in a few days and go out and purchase it. This is extremely inefficient because when we need to buy something like a box of bolts, we cannot wait several days to hear from them to purchase the bolts. So in many cases we just break the rule and our mentors get in trouble but it is alright because it is not worth wasting our work time.
Another issue we had where we got in trouble was with our room. The reason why we chose the upstairs of bishop was because that was where the robotics elective class was. However, after the semester ended along with the class, we continued to stay in the room. This was against their plan because they wanted to use the room for a photo lab. What they did not realize was that after we set up the main game piece, which we call, "the spider," it would be very difficult to make us move. The spider is about 9 foot tall structure with an octagonal base.
Our positive breakthrough that we did have is we were given team status. Yay! This is gives us more privileges which use to be only open to sports teams. But since it is team status, and we are also a team, it is appropriate.
[my schools] Robotics is in its infant state and is still growing. I can see that in the future the administrators will get more use to things and change so that our team can be more efficient. Hopefully the same thing will also happen with the technology that is being integrated into the classrooms.