Saturday, February 25th surely has to be “the” day when The Green Machine really did it all. A third of our team met with our animation mentor, Professor Thomas Gibbons, at the University of Minnesota; another third was present at The Works’ engineering-centric Tech Fest, and still, even more of us were with FIRST Tech Challenge teams as they competed at their regional tournament.
About 2,000 people are estimated to have visited The Works in Bloomington for Tech Fest. Team 1816 brought along our 2011 robot, our beloved Zeebo, who once again captured the hearts of many children and adults alike. Alongside Zeebo was a robot from Team 3081-Bloomington Kennedy High School, as well as exhibits and demonstrations from the University of Minnesota’s Chemistry department and IEEE. The Green Machine talked to many eager kids and even more adults about Zeebo and what makes our robot run, but they were more interested “feeding” Zeebo inner tubes. Our CAD Subteam showed off their 2012 Design notebook, which John N. had in Powerpoint form on his laptop. He was able to walk visitors through many of the design features of our 2012 robot, Zephyr, which is now ready in its giant plastic bag for its trip to the Lake Superior Regional March 7.
At the same time, in Prior Lake, several 1816 members were with their FTC teams. Alex O., Alex P., and Karl O. worked with the four Edina FTC teams present at the Snow Drift Tournament. Lots of good progress was made by all four teams, but by the end of the afternoon, FTC Team 2887-Bucket Brigade’s robot “Howard” proved unstoppable! The team from Valley View Middle School won the tournament and will travel to St. Louis for the World Championship! They also won the FTC “Think” Award, given to the team with the best engineering notebook.
Rather than traveling to Duluth, this time, our animation subteam met at the University of Minnesota with Professor Gibbons, who was in the Twin Cities to attend a conference. The subteam has a deadline of early March to complete the submission for the Autodesk 3D animation contest, which this year involves the animated “Iiko” helping to solve an educational problem here on planet Earth. After our three hour meeting, we then took our turn at The Works, where some of us got a chance to actually drive Zeebo!
Even though this was the first Saturday after the 6-week build for most of us to sleep in, most of us are really glad that we managed to squeeze in as much as we did. It helps get us ready for our first regional competition, the Lake Superior Regional, March 8 – 10 at the DECC in Duluth!