We participated in our first competition (called a
Qualifier) on Saturday, November 16. We didn’t know exactly what to expect, so
we were excited
and nervous. It was a
long, good day. We’ll give you the scoop here.
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| Team Ctrl-Alt-Del with The Bot-Mobile |
We arrived about 7am, set up our “pit area” (which was a
table were we worked on our robot between matches) and then got ready for robot
inspections. There are lots of rules we have to follow when building the robot,
and if it doesn’t pass either the hardware or software inspection, we can’t
compete.
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| Hardware Inspection |
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| Software Inspection |
Then we had some time on a practice field. This was awesome,
since this was the first time we actually got to try the robot on a full field.
Next came the judging session. We had 10 minutes in front of
2 judges to tell them about our team and the season. Our goal was to “impress.”
We each had a subject to present, which took 5 minutes. Then we showed them our
robot. Then we asked what questions they had. Guess what…they didn’t have any!
That means we did a great job presenting, right?!
It was finally time for the robot rounds. We competed in 5
matches during the day. The first match was just OK. We didn’t score many
points but learned a lot. And it was fun!
During the match, we got an idea for scoring more points, but
it meant we needed to change our programming. So we went to the practice field
to work on it. Our coaches and parents said, “You might want to think about
changing your programming. You don’t want to make it worse!” But we did it
anyway
J.
And we’re glad we did. In our next match, we were partnered with Team SharkBite
and together we scored 133 points! That was the highest point total in the competition for the day
so far.
Our other matches weren’t as successful, but we learned a lot in each
one. We realized that a weak link on our robot is the block grabber. It breaks
too easily and we need to come up with another strategy for picking up the
blocks.
Our alliance partner from earlier in the day, SharkBite, was
the number 3 team at the end of all the matches, so they advanced. The top 4
get to choose alliance partners for the semifinals, and SharkBite chose us!
Whichever alliance won the best 2 out of 3 matches moved on to the finals.
We won the first match and were so excited. But then the
other alliance changed their programming to block one of our moves, and it
caused us to not do as well. They won the next 2 matches and advanced to the finals.
