The East robotics team had a good time in Houston and learned some valuable life lessons. In the week before, Graham had hinted something like "maybe we could make it to the semis." Uh-uh. This was The Big Dance in robotics and Chapel Hill meant nothing to nobody there. Our robot finished in the lower middle of the pack of about eighty robots in one of six divisions and was not selected for an alliance to compete in the divisional playoffs.
Really that should have been no surprise. Of the two main things a robot could do to score points (shoot and climb), we only did one -- we shot well -- though it was the higher-scoring and more important of the two. But we didn't shoot well under a lot of defensive pressure, and there were bots that did. That got us through NC competitions -- NC is not as competitive as core regions like CA or MI or Israel -- but it didn't take us very far at Worlds. Also, we just weren't well-known. There were teams there who had been at Worlds 11 years running and had been in the Einsteins (think Final Four) for eight years running. They had huge cadres of parents and mentors there and had thought through every aspect of logistics, down to pre-booking a conference room for a celebratory pizza party and having coolers of drinks chilled. We'll get there, if we want to and stay at it.
Our team had some stupid teenager problems that messed them up like running a robot on a half-charged battery (Dooooohhhh!) or forgetting to flip a switch before a match because they were playing video games on the controller laptop. Could those have changed the outcomes at the margins enough to have let the team be picked up on an alliance in playoffs? Probably not, but maybe. If so, the kids can think about it for the rest of their lives, particularly when drafting or implementing design specs or preparing for important presentations in sales or other funding request contexts. It's a low impact context in which to learn a valuable lesson about attention to detail when working under pressure.
Most importantly, the kids had fun. Our coach and mentors (mostly still college students themselves) had done an awesome job thinking through a lot of stuff, like chartering a bus to go to the Johnson Space Center on Sunday.
Of the eightish NC teams there, the one that did best in the end was the Omegabytes from Spindale (Team 5727). Their ticket to Houston was punched by winning the Chairman's Award for NC, the top award given to a team that best embodies the spirit of FIRST. Spindale is a town of about 4,000, and with about 40 students and 20 parents and mentors participating in the team, it had about 1.5% of the town's population onboard. They were super-inclusive and did a ton of community outreach.
They also had a very solid robot, maybe 6th or 7th in NC at the end of the season. At Worlds theirs outperformed ours and they made it to the semis of their division. Towards the competition's end all the NC teams were down there cheering them on, so per Graham there were about 200 North Carolinians down there cheering against about 150 Israelis. Pretty cool.
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