Robotics

Mary, granny and I rolled out to day 2 of East Chapel Hill's quest to win a robotics competition in Gibsonville. Graham's role on the team has been limited. He is part of the build team but it's unsure just what his specific responsibilities are. Which is cool. Mostly he is learning about being on a team. He has been staying rather late in the evenings, occasionally to the detriment of his school work. But he's sorting that out too.

The competition was rather intense. It was pretty amazing to see how different the robots were. Each team had to make decisions in the design phase about what aspects of the game to focus on. East's robot focused on "cargo" (hefting bouncy balls into chutes -- worth 3 points) and being a high climber (at the end of each round, the robot hauled itself up to a high platform worth a whopping 12 points). Other teams (Carrboro's team - in its rookie season) specialized in hanging disks (worth two points) and playing defense (making forays into the other team's area, banging against their robots, and generally messing them up). After the qualifying rounds, teams picked others to join "alliances", since it's always a game of 3 on 3. During the qualifiers, Graham was a statistician, and he did a fine job at that. It was important to form teams of complementary skillsets, as opposed to just the ones with the hwas ighest scores.

In the end, East came in 2nd (of 36) and won some special awards. The whole shebang was surprisingly engaging, and when it looked like East might get knocked out in the quarters, I was momentarily crestfallen. They came back.

All in all, I have to give it up to parents who do this all through their kids' childhoods. That is, haul themselves off to soccer, basketball, chess, whatever kind of competition. It's a total time- and soul-suck, involving an epic selflessness. Or does it? Certainly one hears of all too many instances of parents getting excessively wrapped up in living through their kids' accomplishments, and the college admissions scandal that broke last week may be just the most extreme instance of that. My point being that this utter level of commitment is not in some sense so selfless at all.

Our team picked the team from Orange High School as an alliance partner, which was a little surprising initially because they weren't ranked that highly. But the parents were right next to us in the stands, and they knew what they were watching (unlike us). They were also vigorous cheerers, and there was a lot of back and forth between alliances between rounds. Blue Alliance vs. Red Alliance, etc. True call and response. At one point in time, the opposing alliance, across the gym, started chanting "We believe that we will win" and then pausing, waiting for us to respond. I was ready to shout them down. The Orange parents did not. The woman to my left, a schoolteacher, explained to me that they did not like that cheer and did not participate in it. Good eggs.