Having barely caught our breath, we were off again to a totally different part of our state for the next regional competition in Silicon Valley. This competition was over Good Friday weekend, so just Delia and I went to San Jose for a few days. The team always stays in a big VRBO and, for this one, the house was actually 2 houses on 1 property-- a girls' house and boys' house. Since there was plenty of space, Delia and I were invited to stay in girls' house with Ella and the other RoboMoms and we had a blast!
Between the 2 competitions, minor adjustments were made to Vector. Ella also made these renderings for a flier to hand out to scouts and judges and it impressed people. (No, I don't understand what most of it says. ;)
The Silicon Valley Regional is the last competition before the World Champs. It attracts some of the best robots in the world and it fills its 60 team capacity. It's known for being aggressive, cutthroat, and competitive. We only got to play 9 matches here, so each one reallllly counted. Again, the luck of the draw had us paired almost exclusively with teams lower than us and never with ones better. This meant more losses than wins, which killed our ranking. The team endured lots of weird trials too. One time they took a super hard hit by 3 robots at the same time that knocked Vector's wiring lose and made him dead for 1 match. A subjective call by a ref gave us a pretty bogus penalty when another robot drove under us, but we paid for it. And one match that we actually won had to be replayed because of a field error. In the replay, we lost. We got quite beat up and humbled here. Nothing we had really hoped for came to fruition in the qualifying matches. Ella and I joked that "the wages of skipping Good Friday church is bad luck at your robotics competition"! :)
(The exciting triple robot balance!)
But, Robotics is not just about the win. We impressed the judges once again.
Being ranked in the bottom half, we weren't in a position to pick our own alliance, but WE were picked by another team, so we still made it to playoffs. And this alliance was another cool, international one-- the other team picked for it was from Mexico! Our guys had fun trading team shirts with one another.
In the playoffs we had a pretty major upset, being the 8th place team and beating the 4th place team!
We won another award!
And we watched our personal stats stay in the very top. This shows us 6th of 60 teams! Amazing! Robotics is a numbers game. If you are doing your scouting well, you're not just looking at ranking, because that is mostly based on luck as we unfortunately learned, but you are looking at these stats and seeing what robots are actually consistently scoring points in all parts of the game. According to these stats, Ella figured out that we are the number 22 robot in all of California! There are 350 teams in California, so we're in the top 6%! This is remarkable, considering what a small team we are in such a competitive area.
The best part of this competition was having the number 1 and number 2 robots at this competition (and the ones that will go on to win Worlds next week, they have 5 times in a row) tell us multiple times that they wanted us as their 3rd in their Finals alliance. It almost hurts to know we could have played with the top teams, won for sure, and gone to Worlds. But alas, we were scooped up by another lower-ranking alliance first. Good for them for doing their scouting, but a bit of bummer for us! ;) It was an honor to have the robot super stars of the world notice us and make the effort to try and work with us.
Ella concludes her Robotics career feeling great about the whole experience. She and her team have an impressive 100% record of winning awards, making it to playoffs, and putting up strong stats. They built the best robot our school has ever sent, caught the attention of judges, top teams, and YouTubers, and made a name for the CarbonKnights in this Robotics world. They forged friendships and made so many fun memories together. Mostly, though, they played with integrity and performed to best of their abilities every single time they took the field. I've had every emotion on the spectrum these past few weeks and have cried more than once, but what we feel most at the end of this ride is pride for our brilliant, talented daughter and gratitude that she introduced us to this world. Ella says she hopes to stay in it, volunteering at regionals in Southern California, near her college, and maybe mentoring her own team some day.
1 comment:
Bravo to the Carbon Knights for their hard work, integrity, and good sportsmanship. Your blog explained so much more about Ella and the team. We were so excited to be able to watch the meets on our computer, but now we understand even more of the behind the scenes strategy, etc. We are so proud of Ella and her team. Ella has such grace and poise, and we are not surprised that she was chosen as team captain. Sounds like such fun and excitement for your whole family to be part of this adventure. I'm so happy that we were able to experience part of it also.
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