Well, to start today's entry, I'll say that I'm back on campus safe and sound. (It's kind of a habit when I'm away from home for more than a day or so to tell someone when I'm back.) Also, my credit card never got declined, so yay for that! It was declined the last time that I traveled, but it was only St Louis for a weekend, which I had done previously.
In the grand scheme of things, the FIRST Robotics regional we competed in was pretty smooth. There was only one point this morning where it seemed like they had to pause matches to figure out a technical issue. Outside of that, matches were on-time, and there were some good games to watch. Our team had a better Saturday than Friday: we finished 3-7, which put us in 49th place. That's not where I wanted us to be, but it's not significantly worse than last year's final ranking. Given all the difficulties we overcame both before competition and during the past few days, I'll take what I can get. If anything, our team did have a handful of points to our name because our human player scored a few Frisbees at the end of a couple of matches. (In the last 30 seconds of a match, you can have people chuck Frisbees into the goals where the robots would be putting Frisbees into. Apparently, my team's human player scored the most points after getting hit with another Frisbee the opponent alliance threw off-target, by accident, of course.) For more information, I would encourage you to explore thebluealliance.com since they have oodles of information about FRC teams/events, but it might be a little bit before videos are posted to their site.
Now that competition is done, I told my team that I want them to take some time off. It seems like most students have 1-4 academic commitments this week (test, paper, etc.), so not focusing on Robotics shouldn't be too hard. At least for a couple of days. Then after Spring Break, I do want to have the team organize, make informational binders for next year's student leaders, and various side projects that would be good to do before the summer.
Since I've been posting about FIRST Robotics everyday I'm at competition, I'm not sure what I've discussed already. The best way to sum the whole experience up is that we're a weird team. There are many things that we do not share in common with a typical high school with a FIRST Robotics team - we're a 2-year program, we have a very tiny budget and just me as the mentor, our students come from all across Missouri, South Korea, and China... the list does go on. One thing that was really cool was how many people were interested in our program in general. Right after our final match, I ended up talking to a representative of KC STEM Alliance, which is devoted to STEM education in the Kansas City area. At the end of the chat, she said that "you guys should be more funded since you're housing some of the brightest students in the state". Hopefully we can see if KC STEM Alliance is willing to stretch a dollar or two an hour-and-a-half north.
Similar to summer camps and conferences, it was kind of weird coming back to the building tonight. Since I spent so much time with the team since Wednesday, I was expected people to snicker whenever the word "first" is used in conversation. (I'm not sure why it started, but since the organization is called FIRST, it's a play on words whenever that word is used elsewhere.) Yeah, that's a pretty specific example, but part of me enjoyed being able to just focus on the team. Then again, sleeping in my own bed and not spending the majority of my conscious hours with extra safety goggles on is also good.
Once again, the time to crash is upon us... me. Have a great night, stay warm, and talk to you later!
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