Regionals Tournament

9:10 Robot Design

We started by running our missions… which didn’t really work. Then, we showed all of the “cool” things about our robot. Truth is, we expected them to be blown away, because we felt we had some pretty impressive ideas, attachments, and programs. They said they liked it, but we didn’t think they really liked it. When we showed them our programs, they were amazed.

9:50 Robot Run #1

There were a lot of problems. Like, the string was too low, or the referee refused to slide the airplane down the rest of the way (which is in the rules). Although nothing actually “worked”, we were still able to score 207 points!

10:55 Robot Run #2

This time, things started to “work”… but guess what! We only scored 83 points… Which made us really nervous for our 3rd run, since it was our last chance!

11:50 Project

Our skit went great! When one of our team members blanked, and couldn’t remember their next line, Amy went on with her line, which recovered her! It’s a good thing, because we could’ve all been waiting there with blank, worried expressions on our faces (not to mention the audience was huge, every student desk was taken up and there were even people along the walls!).

The judge thought the last line that Nancy plopped in (improv) was funny, and wrapped it all together.

The questions she asked, we covered. Practicing paid off.

12:50 Core Values

For the activity, we did pretty good. One person figured out how to do it, and explained it to everyone else. We answered the questions, with a hesitation for a couple “confusingly worded” ones. It was easy, and we didn’t have to pretend that we worked good together, because we do!

1:30 Robot Run #3

Talk about stressful. We had decided to take out a mission and do a different one that we had thought we wouldn’t do the night before, and then during the run we decided to do it, but then we realized there wasn’t enough time and we still had to do the last mission… it was confusing. Even though we tried angling the robot better, and making sure we didn’t break any jigs (which happened in an earlier run), nothing worked. At the end, our robot ended up by the house instead of the red area, which luckily scored us some points for having family with water and animals. Turns out we didn’t connect our robot right… We scored 158 points.

2:10 Head-to-Head

Our robot was still mad at us and didn’t work. We lost the first round with 16 points, the other team got about 200.

4:15 Award Ceremony

Project, no. Core Values? Nope. Robot Runs? Uh, no! Technical? Yes!!! We even got called up twice, once for Robot Design and another for Programming!

Now, the scariest part: Announcing who gets to go to state. “In the lakes division… we have Height Differential” *and the crowd goes wild* “… and……. P…onytail… Posse!!!” We had been clapping for Height Differential, but now that the question was over, we went crazy! Better yet they called The Imaginative Orange Pi Guys, too! (We cheered even more for them than for us.)