[sircedric4]

I learned a lot this weekend and all of it just makes me sick to my stomach. Looks like this year will be a very good year for lessons learned for our team bible.

1) The GDC did an awesome job this year building a trap. Let's call the game Ultimate Ascent and introduce this awesome pyramid and impossible top target and then it turns out to be a waste of a season to defeat the obstacle. We and only a few others conquered the very difficult only to watch EVERYONE (hyperbole!) outscore our top end.

We have this awesome climber and dumper and I am seriously thinking about scrapping the whole thing and bolting a quick 3 day robot shooter, human fed device and quick ram the bar 10 pointer to the robot at our one and only regional.

2) Autonomous and frisbee throwing is perhaps the easiest I have ever seen it when it comes to scoring pieces. This is a year that experience actually worked against us. There has never been a scoring game with such consistent pieces, so one lesson learned is always build a game piece scorer immediately before even trying to determine your strategy.


Congratulations all teams of FRC for bringing some good scoring to the game and I guess it will only get better from here for you frisbee throwers.

I could go on but I am just gonna try and reconcile what I saw this weekend with how we saw the games going and determine what we are gonna do. Honestly we are so tired after such an exhausting build season, that I suspect we will just "run what we brung" and we will be the cool looking climber that does contribute consistently. I know that will earn us a spot on an alliance, but it really is disappointing to take the road less traveled and find everyone else at the destination when you get there.

The journey this year will hopefully be worth it since we will definitely have a lot of lessons learned. This year the students and I get to deal with conquering the impossible and that awesome feeling, and then we get to learn how to deal with disappointment when everyone and their mother outscores with "easier" robots.


(PS. I am not trivializing the "easier" robots before you get all in a hissy, I know all those were built in the same 6 week vacuum we were. But shooters have been done for years and there was a 3 day robot, so frisbee throwers were easier to get a base scorer.) :-)