[SavtaKenneth]

This entire season was a giant awesome memory for me. The 2010 season was really bad for our team. It started off with the lack of pre-season training. We started recruitment only two weeks or so before the season. We worked with an impractical schedule, had a pretty horrible administration, designed and built a swerve drive that was mostly made from KOP parts that was supposed to cross the bump (It even almost worked!) and then we got seeded 46th out of 52 teams, this was the first year we didn’t get into elims. It was a pretty traumatic season.

Our team is 95% student run. I and two other juniors (at the time, we’re currently decided that we wanted a better team for the future. With very little direct teacher help we rebuilt the team. We started with recruitment towards the end of the school year, we established a process that includes going through the freshman classes (We are only allowed to include sophomores-seniors in our team) and presenting the team to them. Then interviewing the student. We didn’t end the process there; we held summer workshops to train the new students in programming and building. This included us building a curriculum while being advised from our teachers and seniors we still did the majority of the work. Seeing these workshops come together is my first favorite memory of this season. We finally broke the cycle of the team only running during the season. It was one of my best weeks of the year.

Then came the off-season (We have only one off-season competition in Israel so we call it “the”), as I mentioned our 2010 robot was really horrible, so we decided we’re going to build a new robot to compete. We managed to get kids every day during summer vacation for three weeks to build a robot that’d compete in the off-season. It was one of the funner builds I’ve had. We even managed to produce new shirts just for the off-season (IMO the best team shirts to date). Although we ended up having a horrible performance all of our students enjoyed it a lot. So this was another fun memory for me, although it left a lot to be desired it still taught us a valuable lesson towards the 2011 season.

The other two things we did in the off-season were trying to find sponsors, which was the first time we did it in a serious manner, and having more workshops for preparing for the season. The first time we got a sponsor to say yes was amazing. This is the third favorite memory of the season.

This time we built a more realistic schedule and managed to stick to it up until the fourth week as a personal reminder for years to come I’d like to quote a friend of mine: “schedules always work, until they don’t”. But we did a great design process; I want to believe we’ve established a groundwork upon which future seasons will be built. The season was filled with awesome moments for me; I mostly acted as a mentor for the team. I think my entire hands-on work was one class in the code and tightening a screw or two. But we worked in organized manner and the robot coming together was a lot of fun. There are two experiences during the season which I thought the most amazing. First one was our annual all-nighter, it’s always a fun experience but this year it was really great for me to see how the kids who a couple of months ago didn’t even know each other worked together efficiently to make the robot work. It was at this point I knew we did a good job as an administration. The second one was presenting at our school’s open house. This was the first time we did it and our room was always packed. There were so many students there looking at the robots, it was great. I think it was our first great step towards changing the attitude of the school towards robotics. I’ll wait another year to judge this but I’ve a feeling we’ll have a flood of Freshman when next year’s recruitment comes around.

This next memory is personal and unrelated to the team, this year I refereed at four out of five FLL regionals in Israel. This was a really nice experience for me, I got to mingle with the FIRST Israel staff more than ever before, and they are really awesome people. I helped set up the fields and take them down. When the 5th tournament came the volunteer manager asked me “How are we going to have an event without you?”. That was one of my highest points of this season.
My last two favorite memories came during the competition. Our robot was full of problems, one thing broke after another. We came close to breaking point and giving up at a few times but we never gave up. For example after our arm broke twice during the competition, we decided to improve our mini-bot deployment to remain competitive. My first favorite memory was after we got knocked out of elimination our entire team still stood and cheered until the end of the competition. At first we just cheered for our team but then we also started cheering for other teams, including the alliance that beat us during the QF. Winning the Gracious Professionalism and website awards was the icing on the cake for the competition. The last favorite memory of the season was the attitude of the students after the competition, we had every possible problem but they still stayed with the urge to succeed and came out of it wanting to improve for next year. Overall it was a brilliant season for our team, in my opinion it was the best so far but I’m slightly biased…


Sorry for writing so much, it's just that I had a lot on my mind about this season.