Written by Team Captain, Phoebe
Our Minneapolis competition this year was amazing and tough and kind of a roller coaster - so much happened so quickly!
I have to preface this by saying that we chose a super ambitious design for our Minneapolis robot and so the weeks leading up to the competition were filled with intensive work to get the robot ready. I'm sure I was not the only one wondering if it would function. Before we loaded in on Wednesday, we had to remove the arm from our robot and do major surgery, and most of our arm controls were written Wednesday night, an amazing effort from our programmers!
Come Thursday morning, it seemed that our robot was (miraculously?) working, and we were looking forward to getting on the field and giving our drivers some practice. Then, we discovered that the issue we had tried to fix the previous afternoon was back... and the only thing to do was to disassemble the robot again, and fix it better. So we missed all of our practice matches, and we fixed the robot. While that was happening, our scouts were hard at work as well. We worked with three other local teams to collect match data using the collaborative system we created, and Thursday's practice matches were a great time to train. A few more students focused on collecting data interview style. At the very end of the day, we were able to get the robot into a few filler matches.
Friday was filled with learning, as our drivers improved and mistakes were found and fixed, and we played better and better throughout our qualification matches. Our Impact Award presentation crew had our interview with the judges, before which we de-stressed by making a whole lot of puns, and our presentation seemed to go well! The evening plan was to have a team dinner (from the Naughty Greek!) and meet to talk about our strategy for playoffs and who we would like to work with. The blizzard threw a wrench in our plans, and we adapted to a virtual meeting so that we could send students home before it got too bad out. In that meeting, we were able to use the data collected by scouts to make a comprehensive list of robots we'd like to work with.
After a delayed start on account of snow, we went into Saturday hoping that all the work from the day before would result in consistent robot performance during the last three qualification matches. Our robot had other plans! In fact, our robot broke in our first match so badly that we had to miss our second match in order to fix it. The team kept positive and supportive and everyone crossed their fingers we'd make it to our last qualification match. And we did! And we played well! I remember in that moment feeling so strongly that I wanted to see our robot on the field again. Luckily, I would get to, because we were chosen to join the 4th alliance as the third robot, and we felt so fortunate that the teams picking us put their trust in us after all of the challenges we'd had. Playoffs gave us another beautiful five matches, and our alliance landed in third place. After being eliminated, we were all saying to each other, "Do you remember where we were on Wednesday?"
We had a blast watching finals, our team sharing the stands with our scouting alliance teams, and we danced and cheered and laughed and enjoyed it. After the medals for the winners and finalists came the Impact Award announcement, the last award and the last announcement of the whole event. The Impact Award is a big deal in FIRST. They say that "it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST." Teams that win get to go to the world championship. And we had submitted, but I didn't think we'd win.
And then the first word of the announcement was "unicorns" and we all collectively lost it. It's kind of hilarious to watch the video back and see us all process that it was us. And then we were crying and laughing, and if you haven't already realized we do a lot of that on this team.
So! We're going to worlds! We get to compete again! And I am so in love with our team. I'm so proud of every single one of my teammates. My team is amazing. Worlds is going to be amazing. I cannot believe how lucky I have been to have the privilege to lead the team these last few years. I cannot wait to do it for one more beautiful competition! There is so much work to do to get it to come together, and we'll keep you updated.