Competition Made for Nerds: Robotics

This past weekend, I went with my school's robotics teams to participate in a VEX Robotics North San Diego Regionals Sack Attack Competition.  The Our school as 4 teams: Robocelots, Snoop Lions (my all girls team :D), Lynx-Sys, and Wild Tigers.  Each team had been working their robot for a while, so we were really excited to go on the trip.

At the last competition we went to, none of our teams were all that impressive.  My team's robot ended up being pretty decent, albeit small and kind of flimsy.  We ranked 18th out of 32 teams, which we weren't too happy with, but I guess we couldn't have expected much from our robot after having spent only a month or so on it.

For this competition, we scrapped our old robot and built a new one with the same general design. It's a lot bigger and sturdier now:

There's me awkwardly smiling for the camera...

And I guess that really helped us out a lot, because we ended up in 6th place by the time the alliance selections came around - and if you don't know this already, rank is super important when it comes to alliance selections, because the 8 teams get to pick their alliances.  So it was a big deal that 3 of our teams (Snoop Lions, Robocelots, and Lynx-sys) made it into the top 8.  Snoop Lions was ranked highest out of our school's teams.  The fact that we're one of the only all-girls teams around makes it even more awesome.

Yay!  I carried the robot everywhere.  My arms are sore now.

My team ended up picking another school's team as its alliance due to some confusion, while Lynx-sys and Robocelots partnerned.  Our quarterfinals match was against their alliance, and we ended up losing (but only by a little!).

 Do we look like the Witches of Eastwick?

That's okay, though, because then the Robocelots/Lynx-sys alliance ended up facing the number 1 and 3 ranked teams and got crushed in the semi-finals.

Even though we lost, the competition was so much fun.  We got to meet some really cool teams from other schools (including the 1st place team who crushed us) and it was just fun to hang out with each other.  I think that's the most important part: having fun.  It sounds cliche, I know, but it's really true.

All the teams!  Look at me, crouched in the front row and looking all cool.  It wasn't my idea.

Anyways, feel free to ask me any questions!

High School Robotics

I don't know if you remember, but last year, Chloe was on her middle school Lego-League robotics team.  This year, the fun continues!  I (Eileen) am on one of the four high school VEX robotics teams at school.  I was actually not too happy about joining the team because it's pretty nerdy, and I didn't want to perpetuate the Asian nerd image. However, since I was a new student at my school last year, and didn't participate in anything school related, I did want to participate in some school activities this year.  I thought Robotics team would be the least time consuming because the course syllabus says two extra hours during the week and I knew I could handle that easily. . . until after I joined, I found out that I needed to be there every Saturday too, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.  There go my weekends.

But it turns out I actually like the class and team a lot.  Many of my friends are on the team, so that probably helps! Because our school mascot is the wildcat, the team names are all supposed to be wildcat-related.  I'm on an all girls team called the Snoop-Lions!We also have a Lynx Sys, Robocelots, and Wild Tigers.

Our vex robot being built.

A few weeks ago, we went to the first competition of the year.  I've never been to a robotics competition before, but it's a lot of fun. It's a nerd fest.

This year's competition game is Sack-Attack, so we're basically supposed to build robots that can put as many sacks in the goals as possible within a given time frame.

Competition at Cabrillo High School

 ...Let's just say we didn't do so well this time.  It's okay!  Our next competition is the Vex Robotics regionals in San Diego (yay!, and because it's for two days, we'll stay in a hotel! Really exciting. It won't be for another month or so, so we'll have time to work on our new robot.  I'll post pictures of it when it's done!