Day 1 of Competition.

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Well, today was a huge rollercoaster.  We started out the day watching a team from another country practising on our practise table.  It was amazing how similar their robot and programs were to our own.  It was obvious that our videos didn’t show the light sensor assemblies very well, because they didn’t get those correct, the but the rest of the robot was very, very similar. 

 This really got our kids down, but we had to realize that “imitation is the best form of flattery”.  It is just painful that they are one of the 400 point teams right now and we haven’t done one yet.  I told them it would be really great if we ran against them in the finals.  At least our design would be at the top.

After getting down about that, the kids had their research project presentation – they were flawless.  I’m still not sure we have the strongest research project in the field (there are several teams who are there simply because of thier research projects), but the kids did better than anyone could imagine.  We should at least get some credit for having an interesting presentation.  But the best part was that every one of the kids rose above their own ablities and did a knockout job.

After that, we ran our first table mission.  The problem was that the referees didn’t follow up on the agreements that were made with the coaches the night before.  They did not allow our entire team to go up to the table for “tag teaming” the round, something the kids practiced on a lot.  They miss counted our score for “dumping the dumpster” because there were still 2 dirt pieces in it.  Finally, they run the clocks backwards.  Instead of starting at 2:30 and counting down to 0, they were starting at 0 and counting up to 2:30.   At one critical point, I looked up at the timer and saw that we had 45 seconds.  I took that as having :45 left and we ran our PGM 2 backup which takes about 45 seconds to complete and skipped the backup elevator which would have given us another 40 points and could have been done in about 20 seconds.  All that to say that we could have done better.

After that, we switched to the Blue robot and were able to score several 400’s on the practice table.  So then we had to go to technical judging.  This was the first time in all of our competitions that the robot ran the perfect 400 in front of the technical judges.  The judges were literally yelling “Wow” at several points and they were all smiling broadly and shaking their heads.  I couldn’t really hear what the kids were saying from where I was standing, but the judges were very impressed.

Next, we went back out for our second time at the table.  This round was a lot better, we left 2 pieces of dirt in the fabric (which would have cost us 4 points), but then the “blue table of death” caught us.   On the white atom we push off in front of us, it was a little too close to the edge and instead of toppling off, it was pushed out to the edge of the table where we couldn’t reach it anymore.   At this point, we had a score of 386, but knew we would need at least a 390 to make it  into the finals, so we tried a backup mission that had worked with some success before.  If we were successful, we would have been in really good shape with a 396.   Unfortunately, it was not.

So that’s where we finished the day.  If we stay true to Flying Geeks form we should start getting better and better through the finals.  If we don’t, then we’ll be done tomorrow morning.

Other than that, everyone is doing great.  Everyone went to bed early – I think mostly because of emotional exhaustion.

Please continue to pray for us.  We have made some interesting friendships and this has been an awesome experience.

Randy

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