When we arrived at the competition, after a late night of working on the bot, an early morning wake-up, and a four-hour drive, we were already quite tired, but we were looking forward to a fun day filled with awesome robots and friendly competition. We hadn’t had too much time to prepare for this competition, but we had our robot and were ready to do our best.
After a few quick tune ups and tests, we were off to our first match of the day. Our first match was a tough one, one of the other robots took advantage of a loophole in the rules so although we did decently well, we didn’t score as many points as we could have. We also had a few technical issues with loose wires that caused us to lose connection once or twice during the match.
After the match however, we fixed up the few issues we had with wiring, and then in the second match, we did better than we had ever hoped, scoring almost three times as many as we did in round one. Overall, we got 9th place out of 50 teams, so we just barely missed semifinals, for all of our first time in this competition we were proud of all we accomplished.
The best part of this competition, for me at least, wasn’t the robots. Although they were incredibly fun, my favorite thing was the comradery with all the other teams. Even though we were competing, whenever a robot would score you could hear the collective jubilation or if a robot died you could hear all the apologies in the air. We met so many new friends from schools all over the country, and over all this event was a fantastic opportunity.
With writing by Kyle O’Donnell; Photos by Juan Zamudio and Christopher Kitson