For four incredible days at the end of April, FIRST Team 1816 – The Green Machine was in St. Louis for the FRC World Championships! Participating in the premier FIRSTRobotics event, with 400 teams from the U.S., Canada, Israel, Mexico and Australia, is to be among some of the smartest and most talented kids ever. Better yet, we were all intent on doing the same thing: Competing at the highest-level possible while still remaining gracious and extending friendship and help so that everyone had a chance to compete!
How best to describe the competition itself? The 400 teams were divided into divisions and we played four separate fields in the Edward Jones Dome: Archimedes, our division; Curie, Galile, and Newton. These fields only took up part of the space. There were two fields devoted entirely to FIRST Tech Challenge, another field where FIRST Lego League was placed and still another FIRST Field, Einstein, where the final Championship matches were held. On Einstein, the division champions play for the title of FIRST champion. Just walking around the stadium to the stands for our division took a lot of time.
While most of us were busy scouting other teams or working on Zephyr, several Green Machine team members were preparing to make our Chairman’s Award presentation to an entirely new panel of Judges. The Chairman’s Award, the highest achievement that FIRSTawards, is what won our FIRST team a spot at Championships. The Chairman’s Award is given to the team that best exemplifies the values of FIRST: Of reaching out to others in the community-at-large to demonstrate excitement and inspire others to delve deeper into science, technology and engineering, plus to help other FIRST teams succeed and thrive, too.
For the most part, it was worth the walk from pits to stands just to see our 2012 Robot, Zephyr, do what she does best playing the multi-tiered Rebound Rumble game. Zephyr managed at times to show her consistency in aiming and shooting baskets. But Zephyr dropped her radio contact (d-Link) at least twice with our robot drivers, and we lost those two matches because our robot wasn’t moving. Another piece of bad luck came during another match when balls got stuck in unexpected places on the robot and we couldn’t do anything to shake them loose in time to continue scoring points. Only a few minor modifications were made, changing wheel treads and adding LEDs to make Zephyr’s “Gear Eyes” shine. In between matches, builders and programmers swarmed over Zephyr, trying to fix whatever needed to be fixed. By the final match, Zephyr was working pretty well. Still, the losses added up and we ended up ranked 72 in the Archimedes Division.
In our brief downtime between matches, many of us on The Green Machine took advantage of visiting with the many colleges and universities that had set up booths. It was an opportunity to talk about taking science, math and engineering majors in college. Many of these colleges offer numerous scholarships available only to those on FIRST teams, something definitely worth considering when looking at which college to attend.
Now that Zephyr has arrived back from St. Louis, our team will get her ready for her next competition. Her next stop is the May 19 Minnesota State High School League Championship, to be held in Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota. This is the same arena as the Minnesota 10,000 Lakes Regional, but it is across the street from the arena where Zephyr played at the end of March. There will be 28 teams to compete for the title of FIRST MSHSL Champion! The Green Machine won its way into the event by earning points, everything from our website to our business plan to Zephyr herself. We are very proud to represent our team’s sponsors and Edina High School in this first-ever Robotics state competition.