The Green Machine held its own this weekend at Roseville Area High School for the Minnesota Robotics Invitational event. This was a great experience for rookies to see what FIRST Robotics Competitions are all about. Returning team members got to reminisce about last year’s game, Aerial Assist. Many great moments occurred including the rookies getting to watch the repairs on ZEKE as well as participate in driving the robot on the field. One of our captains, Peter H., stated that he was “pleasantly surprised” at the new talent in driving he saw from our 2014-15 rookies. The Green Machine ended qualifications as the #1 seed, and had the pleasure of picking 3 more teams to join its alliance. We selected Teams 2052-KnightKrawler, 4607-CIS and 2472-Centurions as our alliance partners. We won the first round of the finals, but lost the second match by 1 point. We re-grouped as an alliance and came back, winning the final match 103-to-95. It was a nail-biter at the end, with an unexpected penalty causing us to worry. The real MVPs, in this writer’s opinion, were our alliance partners 4607 and 2052. With speed and agility, they scored many points during their matches while assisting the entire alliance. One of the surprises at the event were that both 2052 and 2175-The Fighting Calculators, each brought two robots! Team 9001-Greg and Team 8052 were both out on the field bringing a lot of excitement to the event. Thank you to everyone who came out and supported our team!
