At the first (haha no pun intended) competition we went on our trip, we won the Judges Award! Although, we did struggle with our robot throughout the weekend. Despite the intense time frame of the tournament our team collaborated and we worked quickly to solve all these issues.
Our driver station had connection issues and sadly, we ended up having to get rid of the station. The team brought back up xbox controllers in case something happened so, we reluctantly decided to replace our driver station with those. In between matches we desperately had to reprogram the xbox controller to work with the robot. Throughout the rest of the matches we struggled with connection issues and our motors. The robot tended to drift when it drove or the controllers would be backward so we couldn’t even focus on delivering anything. The most reliable part of the robot was our SHPA’A (Second Hatch Panel Autonomous Attachment), which we were able to use once our drive train started working. At the last round we got a hatch panel at the very top of the rocket, this was worth all the hard work! By the end of the competition we decided that the redline motors we were using were having a lot of issues. Since we didn’t get picked for alliances we had hours of time we could build out of bag in our pit. The team decided to take out the red line motors along with the shifting gear box, and replace them with CIM motors. Nonetheless, we kept our spirits up and worked through the day to solve our problems and improve for the next competition!
Besides the robot, we had the chairman’s interview right after lunch of Saturday along with one team member’s Dean’s List interview in the afternoon. The chairman’s interview went pretty well and the members talked a lot but weren’t able to finish the presentation. The judges asked some questions and the team got in all the important points. Meanwhile some new members were able to switch out on the drive team while those drive team members were in Chairmans, it was a great experience for the new members. Sadly, our dean’s list interviewee did not advance in the competition. The judges and other teams came and asked us a lot of questions about our Riley Robot book. That actually helped us with our award! We won the Judge’s Award, the Literacy Award, for our outreach of promoting literacy through STEM. We were very happy with this award and all our struggles paid off in the end.
Clearly, there were challenges throughout the weekend but we were very proud of how the team pulled together and learned what to improve on the next competition.