This is the first year we did not participate in a Week 1 competition event. In the first few years as a new team, it was better for us to play in a week 1 event since it is more of a level playing field when nobody has played the game yet and no one knows what to expect. However, last year we tried to design an all-around robot and ran out of time to fully test the robot which resulted in our robot not working properly at our week 1 competition. Based on that experience, we decided against week 1 events. It was a good decision because we ran out of time again this year so the extra week was very useful.
We arrived at Waterford High School with high expectations. During the build season, we put equal emphasis on the building of the robot and the preparation work for winning the awards. Our goal was to get to the finals and win two awards.
Competition was fierce. Our robot worked better than we expected even though we had very limited time to calibrate the shooter. Our programmer did a fantastic job putting in a lot of last minute changes. It was nice to finally see the fruits of our labor when the bridge lowering device worked and we could shoot two balls into the basket during hybrid mode.
The semifinals match was very close. We tied after the first two matches. In the third match, we were ahead by 8 points but were accidentally flipped by our alliance partner when we tried to balance on the bridge with them. We ended up losing by two points.
However we were pleasantly surprised to win 3 awards at the event. We won the Best Website award, Engineering Inspiration award, and Imagery award. I was most proud of our team winning the Imagery award. In our rookie year, our robot got laughed at because it was built with the cheapest material we could find. The students felt bad when they saw other team’s robot with nice paint and expensive polycarbonate sheets. In the last two years, our robot looked progressively better but we focused more on function than the look. This year, discussion on robot appearance started right in the beginning. We decided to follow the same theme as our pit, website and newsletter. The robot looks very nice and it is easy to identify that it is our team.