On March 12, 2020, Ella's Robotics team was sent home from competition without ever having had the opportunity to fire up Rookie, the ball-launching robot they created her freshman year. Then her sophomore year, they continued building a remarkable robot, Shorty, but alas competitions did not yet resume, so Shorty stared in a short documentary and impressed middle schoolers at an assembly, but never competed. You can probably imagine the excitement and nerves as this year the team FINALLY took a robot they made, Katana, to a real competition in Sacramento last Wednesday!
Competitions are 3 days events. The first night they set up their pit. The first full day is inspection, prep and practice. Imagine a college sports arena divided in two-- one half is 43 teams' pit crews full of every tool and spare part to fix any possible problem that may pop up as the robots compete. The other half is the playing field. Walking around is a whole vibe! The place is buzzing with nervous energy. Robots on carts are being raced through the aisles to queue up in time for the next match. When you hear a team shouting "ROBOT!" it means move out of the way, or get run over. Donna said she felt like it was the ER with gurneys racing around and a "HURRY! Code Blue! We're gonna lose them!" sense of urgency. :) Some teams are super slick, hailing from Silicon Valley and sponsored by tech giants. Some teams are small and modest, like ours. Everyone is excited to trade buttons and scout each other out-- asking questions about their robots. Ella made lots of new friends and hopes to keep in touch via social media.
As I've written before, Robotics teams are composed of Engineers, who build the robot, and Programmers, who write the code that runs the robot. Ella is on the coding end. She is the Lead Programmer and wrote a pretty cool autonomous code that made our robot unique in its climbing task.
Dave and I loved going to competition as chaperones/mentors! We rented a big VRBO and had the whole team stay together in one lovely house. I planned fun meals and cooked them. Dave was an unexpectedly essential pair of hands for the small team, doing everything from training our scouts to running to Office Max and Home Depot for tools and parts we forgot. The first day of prep was stressful. The robot weighted in at 126.5 pounds. It has a 125 pound limit, so that had to quick be remedied to pass inspection. Then the robot was not functional until late afternoon. They even missed one of their practice slots. Though most of the kids on the team are juniors, this was their first competition and it took almost a whole day to get their groove.
Every one of the thousands of Robotics teams that are a part of FIRST around the globe are given the exact same task and the exact same amount of time to figure it out (approximately 2.5 months). How many people you have on your team, how much sponsor money you secure and spend, and how you do it are ALL different, producing no two robots that look alike. This year the task was to taxi autonomously for 15 seconds, scoop up balls that match your team's color, shoot the balls in low or high baskets, and then climb a 3 step ladder in the last seconds of the match. We simply don't have the manpower or resources to accomplish all of these tasks, so our team decided its strategy would be to nail that ladder climb-- it was worth the most points, and building a ball-shooting robot was something they had already done and felt a little unexcited about.
Before each match, Ella served as the Technician, getting us plugged in and the code up and running, then she handed it over to the Drive Team. The Drive Team can't step over the line and take over until the Autonomous time is done. Then, once the drivers get the controls, they can move the robot around the course, picking up and shooting balls and playing defense-- something we were just okay at.
BUT, once we hit the climbing portion of the competition, we did it perfectly and consistently. Our robot's carbon fiber body, "mouse trap" extending and gripping arms, and autonomous code that allowed it to climb without human control, were things that impressed the judges. And once we made it to that top monkey bar, we scored a ranking point each match! At the end of the first day of competition, we were ranked in the top half. At the end of the second day, we were ranked IN 11TH PLACE!!!
To level the playing field and allow small teams like ours to have a shot against the 125 member NASA team that ended up winning the whole thing, the competition is run by alliances. It's never one team against another. It's always 3 on 3 and these are constantly changing. So, sometimes you play a match with awesome teams that boost you up and sometimes you are with struggling teams that drag you down. FIRST actually has a name for this brilliant taste of real life-- "Cooperatition". A combination of cooperation and competition. I LOVED watching this play out! When we were struggling, bigger, better schools came to our pit to help us with repairs. When we had a good match, teams came to scout us out and learn more about our impressive climb to maybe align with us. The picture above is Ella fist-bumping fellow alliance members. Lots of camaraderie! In the end, our 11th place rank got us all the way into the Top 8, as a 7th seed team, able to captain and choose our own alliance to compete in the Finals with. We did not make it out of the quarterfinals, but that was expected. The team shattered expectations finishing as high as they did!
Competing and scouting for potential alliances are just some of the many components, though. Over the 3 days, judges are stopping by regularly to ask questions about your robot. They want to know everything! How well you can articulate the build process and team strategy makes a big difference in how you impress them for the awards they hand out at the end. Ella did much of our talking to the judges (she just had the best gift for that of everyone on the team), and we ended up winning the big Judges Award!! This meant so much to our little team-- that the judges saw something special and impressive in them! Our RoboKnights got to run in front of everyone to wave and accept the award.
The team made their way home later on Saturday night, exhausted, but with adrenaline coursing through them from this "infinitely stressful, but infinitely fun" (to use Ben's words) weekend. The whole car ride home was a conversation about how to take the robot apart and make everything better for their next competition in a week!
Dave's and my first robotics competition blew all our expectations away! We could have never imagined the highs, the lows, the thrill, the stress, the heart palpitations, the tears, the hoarse voice from screaming, the prayers, the emotion, or the PRIDE a carefully assembled hunk of carbon fiber, chains and motors; some lines of code; and 7 pretty awesome kids would give us!
