[Rick TYler]

Wooden Thunder is kind of short. Even though it was designed and built to score three tetras on the center goal, our little guy was intended to be fast, nimble, and a prolific capper of the short goals. We figured that the 15-foot bots would duke it out on the center goal and we would score all the others.

My proudest moments, strangely, are the two times we capped the center goal in a competition. Once we over-capped a tetra from the other alliance on the center goal. It was like watching an 8th-grader dunk over Shaq.

(For what it's worth, except for the three rounds when our arm had been disabled by a programmer [aarg!] sticking his [aargh!] hands in the electrics, our strategy worked fine. We usually scored 3-5 tetras per round, and went 5-2 in our non-crippled rounds. If we hadn't -- I am not making this up -- had five different driving teams we probably would have done better.)