1/12/2012 - Going to Indiana

Today, our mentor, Mr. Marts called a meeting to ask us if we wanted to go to another tournament.  He had us a spot at the Indiana State tournament if we wanted to go and of course we did.  It will be on March 10th so we will be meeting Tuesday & Thursdays until the tournament gets closer.  We have prioritized a list of nine things we want to do to improve our robot.  We will probably only do the top four that should make the most impact.

12/3/2011- Lego league tournament

Today was the day of the Lego competition.  We set up our game court and demonstrated our robot as was the FRC Bomb Squad. We demonstrated our FTC robot to the kids who are in Lego league to show them what they can do in robotics in their future. We showed them how our robot worked and how our matches run which was different from their matches. We also answered questions about the program.

12/2/2011- Our first tournament

Today was the day of competition. We went through a lot of matches and we ended up being seeded second which meant that when we went to pick an alliance we were second to pick alliance partners. The number one seeded team, team 2888, asked us to be alliance partners and we agreed. We went through the final elimination matches and our alliance won.  Team 2888 went on to win the Inspire award and we were second runner up.  At that point, we realized that since we were the first picked on our alliance and didn’t pick our own alliance we wouldn’t be getting an invitation to World which was a letdown but we did win our first tournament.

10/28/2011-The mast works and we lifted a crate

Today was the day that we took the mast off the makeshift drive base and put it onto the permanent drive base. We were pretty confident that it would work because we had used CAD to get an idea on how long each part of the mast should be. When we ran it we were correct because except for a few minor adjustments it worked just fine! Also today we were able to lift a crate which was a great boost of morale for us.

9/15/2011 –The first meeting

Almost all of us were new to this. Only two had been on the team last year and they were now expected to be able to step up and take charge of some eighth graders who would probably question their every request. It was expected to be hard to get us to work together and to actually meet deadlines on updating our website and building the robot. Our first meeting we went over strategies and started practicing speaking exercises to help us get more comfortable standing and speaking. It was a lot of work but we were able to pull it together and become serious about what we needed to do and how to do it.  All in all a really good first start I’ve been told.