Today we participated in our first ever FTC tournament! It was a long and stressful day, but it was an incredible learning experience, and we feel that it helped us grow as individuals and as a team. The day started out bright and early, and we were prepared and ready to be successful. We called each other from the two cars we were riding in practicing our presentation for the judges interview, and we all became more and more excited. Right as we walked in we realized how different the environment was than FLL , especially because the FLL tournament was happening right next door. From then on, the day was crazy, but the best kind of crazy, filled with lots of great new experiences and things to learn.
We went to the pit area and began to set our stuff up. Before we knew it, it was time for robot inspection, and we raced off to the gym to start that process. It went smoothly and we gladly passed, but our bill of materials wasn't with us, and so Rachel and Ava had to run back to the pit and hurriedly recreate the one we had before. From there we went to field inspection and tested out our autonomous mission, which was very simple. We were surprised to find that very few teams had created an autonomous mission, which helped us to have less anxiety about our own. After that we headed back to the pit, to work on our program a little bit and prepare for our judges interview. Right as we walked into the judges interview we realized how different the experience was from what we had seen in FLL, and how the judges didn't have rubrics, and seemed very interested in what we had to say. The main message that we wanted to show is our goal to spread FTC in Minneapolis schools, as we are the only team from a public school. To do this we volunteer at our old middle school every week to spread a message of the importance of engineering, and show that girls can be successful in engineering just as well as boys can. After that was finishing we got ready for the qualifiers to begin, and everything began to run smoothly as we prepared for the robotics portion of the competition to begin. Going into qualifiers we were very nervous about what was going to happen, and we didn't know what exactly to expect, but we were excited to try something new, and show off all of the hard work we had put into our robot this season. We had some minor connection issues with the new technology, and some other teams had some more major issues, meaning in some rounds our robot was the only one running. In another round, the wheel of our robot literately came off, which caused us to run back to the pit and fix it quickly. In one round our USB hub was not working at all, and we received some help from another team to allow it to work. By the end of the rounds our record was 3-2 and we were ranked 7th, putting us in a good position to be picked for an alliance. Right after that we became slightly nervous however because many of the higher ranked teams were looking like they may pick each other for alliances, putting us in the position to choose one of our own, however did not participate in a large amount of scouting because at the beginning of the day we did not feel like we had the potential to succeed in our first competition. Soon the alliance ceremony began and we were one place away from having to choose our own team. We got chosen for an alliance by 2 teams from Eagan, the blue crew and fourth dimension, which were both teams that could climb the mountain super, super well, so our job in the alliance was to move debris to allow them to do this. The alliance rounds started, and, we participated in 2 of them, due to the fact that our alliance won each of our rounds 2-0, 2-0. Our alliance was the winner of the competition, and we were very excited with how the day had gone. After this we knew that the awards we starting soon, and we were really excited to see how we, and other teams had done. As the awards went on, we saw many of our friends get called up to be successful, and soon we were called up for the connect award, for our outreach in Minneapolis Public Schools, as well as being called up for our winning alliance. Then the state advancing teams were announced, and we were mildly disappointed to find out that we were 7th in the advancing order and 6 teams were able to advance to state. Although we were not advancing, we were excited that the day went to well, and glad that it was such a great learning experience to us. Comments are closed.
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This blog covers details about our outreach events and other events that are important to our team, and our season.
AuthorHi, we are the Rubies, FTC team 9890. To learn more about us, visit the "About Us" page Archives
April 2016
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