Hello, I am Sean from 2150A and I am doing a project on robotics room organization. This has been something that I’ve been intending to do since we moved rooms, but I never had the time to truly get to it. Our old room was a huge mess and while we cleaned up to move all of our stuff to our new room, we never implemented a good system. We ended up just putting things in places that we though made sense, which worked, but not too well. (This move happened during coivd effectively) and once robotics started picking up again so did our mess.
My intent with this project is to figure out some best practices for keeping an organized and productive robotics workspace, and hopfully share any insight that I find. It would be amazing if you could fill out this short survery(I swear its short, its 3 requried questions and one of those is your team number.)
I would love to hear about any cool tips and tricks in this thread as well so I can respond and ask questions. You can also find me on discord in VTOW and other vex related servers. I know there are a lot more coaches here on vf compared to discord, so I would really love to have your insight.
I feel like robotics rooms organization is a topic that doesn’t get enough attention for how much it can effect us. Lets make it better!
We mainly do BEST robotics club, so we like, cut wood and stuff, but the tips still apply. We just converted a cabinet in the room to a tools cabinet with a pegboard in it for some of the tools (drills, saws, misc. things that get lost), but we still have a toolbox. Utilizing wall space lets you see everything available to you. If you know where everything goes you spend less time looking for it. We have one table to keep our organized mess on and any other mess we must clean up before we leave.
For our VEX class, each group has a plastic tote with other tupperware inside that everything gets thrown into. It works, but it isn’t the best.
Could you eleborate on organized mess? What does that mean really? Like we have one table that is a pile of metal, screws and half-build half-taken part mechanisms. It is like that or more like a on going work space.
It depends. It’s basically where all of the parts that we are working on go so that everything stays together. If someone asks “where is this thing that we were making yesterday?” it’s gonna be on that table. Sometimes it is actually organized, but most of the time it is pretty messy. Common tools try to get put away but they may also be found on this table.
Part of the issue with keeping a clean, well organized, and projective space is that it gets messy over time. I want to hopfully figure out how to make that mess less or better yet not happen. By sending a messy closet we can learn what doesn’t work and how the closet got to be like that, and ofc improving the space.
My team did something similar, but we are going to try to keep more organized next year. This works, but it is super easy to lose tools and parts. I still am missing direct drive motor somewhere in the mess.
our closet is a mess and I don’t wanna send a trashy closet.
