There's a calm ">>Normal<<" me, and then there's a robotics me, where I can be yelling "ROBOTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and generally looking like an idiot with non-robotics people. True, I'm nto the one who does it the most *coughlaurencough*. But it's one reason why robotics rocks so much. There's other competitions, but there arent' any where there's so much inter-team co-mingling. Also I get to mess with the mill and the lathe, you can't ever resist that. Oooh the joys of milling aluminum and lathing brass... the pain of lathing steel, ack, there goes a bit.

But at competitions, it's totally the people that make robotics so awesome, sure robots are cool, but people are better.

You would be amazed to see the way my family is into FIRST. All through the building season, while we were worrying about our autonomous, my mother was telling me, "It's too complicated! You have to make it simpler!" She went through this elaborate spiel to try to get me to tell my team to change the design at almost four weeks into the build season. She's more competitive than I am!

Then, when they went to the Phoenix regional, they saw what FIRST was really about. And let me tell you, it wasn't about the robot anymore. That's another great thing about FIRST. Its never really about the robot. That's just extra stuff on the side. What we're really here for is to build relationships and work together in teams!

Of course, that didn't stop my dad from getting hooked. He watched the entire national competition on NASA.gov and called me after every match to talk strategy. After we lost, he waited for about a half hour to call me because he thought I was going to be upset.

But, through my experiences with FIRST, I learned that you don't have to be upset when you lose. The chance to play is all you need!

this is my first yr on the robotics team at my school. what made me interested was the idea of building a robot and seeing it compete. but then build season started and i became a programmer. but that was cool. and then it was regionals and nationals and i had a blast there. i have not had that much fun in a while. so it was probably the amount of fun i had at the regionals and the nationals that has made me decide to start a team up at my new school next year.

Well, I wish that I could say that I went all out last year, but I didn't. When I got here this year though, I was mjorly hooked. Something about Nationals just does that to you, I guess..

I guess what seemed like a million people, and a million balloons, and one cool arena will do that to just about anyone.lol