Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Some Sad News

I don't know if you know, but there was a snow storm last week, and there were a lot of states that got a lot of snow. Unfortunately, the fears over that snow led to the 2nd Qualifier being canceled. So, we didn't end up going to the competition, or the Friday night meeting right before it, either.

But, this did give us a bit of a breather so that we could continue working on the robot and improving the design. The Qualifier did get rescheduled to this Saturday, but only two team members and one coach could go that day, so we decided against going. And, the State competition would be the following Saturday too, so there really wasn't much reason for going anyway, seeing as a competition right after a competition would be a bit stressful.

The Thursday of last week is when we had another outreach event. Another family science night, to be exact, in which we traveled to Manning Oaks Elementary school and explained what FTC was, and what FIRST did, and how to get involved. The kids really enjoyed the robots and how to drive them, and even the adults were intrigued and having fun. They really wanted to know how to start or find a team, which is really good news to us.

Maybe there will be more FLL teams than ever next season.


But anyway, the news is that we have six more meetings (including the meeting that we're at today) until the State competition, and we have to finish our scoring mechanism, make sure that the new and improved robot fits perfectly inside of the 18" x 18" inch invisible box that represents our size boundaries, attach our plow that will save our wheels from the debris, and make sure we can hang in the amount of time given to us in the end game.

I think that things are cruising very nicely, and that we will be able to complete most of our list, if not everything, that we need to do. We are on track for success, and hopefully the judges at the State competition will see that!

I think that we are slowly contracting Too-Much-Time-On-Our-Hands syndrome, too...

They may need to make a cure for that.