Long post - this year's game was tough - here's why:

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Posted by Chris Orimoto at 04/12/2001 12:50 AM EST


Student on team #368, Kika Mana, from McKinley High School and Nasa Ames/Hawaiian Electric/Weinberg Foundation.


In Reply to: Long post - this year's game was tough - here's why:
Posted by Alan Federman on 04/11/2001 6:36 PM EST:



In general, it DID seem that rookie teams had a little trouble this year. Not to create a stereotype though, because as Jason mentioned, many rookie, 2nd- and 3rd- year teams did very well. I doubt facilities had ANYTHING to do with success either...being from one of the "poor" Hawaii teams as mentioned, and struggling to pay the way for ONE regional event (that's ALL, just 1 regional), I am pretty satisfied at our performance. We built a practice bridge and practice goals, but we had about 20ft. of carpet area to work with, a small piece of the center divider, and absolutely-positively NO practice robot. Our 'bot from last year was WAY to different to practice on for this year's competition (being twice as large and 2-wheel drive compared to this year's "limbo-tractor-tank&quot.

This leads me into the next point...I have to agree that this years game DID in fact take away your control of your own destiny. With 4 robots on the field at a time, there was BOUND to be robots with identical functions. I guess one of this year's challenges was for teams to DECIDE on who gets to do it. But, what if your team is on the losing end of that again, and again, and again? Well, a counterpoint could be "That's what the working world is all about". BUT, does a scenario as this do well for the message of "gracious professionalism" employed by FIRST?

I remember in one of our matches, one team tried to convince me that they could balance 1 goal in under a minute for a 5x multiplier. I had to INSIST that we could do 2 goals in under a minute-and-a-half for an 8x multiplier. In that round, the SAME team threw a drive and couldn't make it over the bridge. We were LUCKY that they got out of the way...allowing us to grab a second goal and balance with less than 15 sec. on the clock. With one full goal and NO robots in the endzone...even with a balanced bridge, we got a WHOPPING score of 48.

In another match, a robot fell over while trying to reset the bridge (by driving backwards). We PULLED them out of the way (and got tangled up in the process). HOWEVER, the team that was still on the near side of the field (who we specifically cleared the bridge for) didn't even get to the endzone. They timed out like 5ft short.

I mean, I'm not trying to say that it was everyone else's fault. We made a careless error by not checking our drill clutch and resultingly couldn't pull the stretcher, a task we had performed in previous matches (we were with the #1 seed Cheesy Poofs in that round so the technical difficulty screwed them up as well as us). We also didn't check-balance the bridge in one round, causing it to fall after we timed out (36 secs left by the way...so there was time to check).

But those are the kind of mistakes that can be controlled in the future. However, many facets of this year's game were left uncontrollable by your own team. This did add part of the excitement, but also provided for many of the disappointments. And that's my $1.25 of the story (sorry so long).

Just my personal thoughts (as always)...

Chris, #368