What are your highlights of the build season so far?

[BHS_STopping]

Incidentally, our team highlight probably had to be the accident in the chem lab, right before we left for our workplace.

Basically, one of our electronics guys accidentally broke one of the faucets in the chemistry lab. And when I say break, I mean he snapped the thing clean off of the pipe. Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the thing gushed about four feet into the air without stopping. Then our teacher ran in, panicing. Well, at least we had a plumber on hand before we had the chance to turn the school into an aquarium...

[Ian Curtis]

When our head mentor and a student mananaged to only lay 11" of weld in a 3 hour meeting, the mentor said, "If I was me, I'd fire us."

A low point of the season emerged when last weekend, for lunch we orded 2 2-liter bottles of Sprite, and no where, in the entire school, could we find cups. Luckily we managed to secure some bottles from the vending machine, which was empty this weekend, forcing us to build without a handy bottle of tasty iced tea. The terror!

w00t: Post number trivia of the day. Which team has posted a video in which 10 balls are scored in 1 second?

[dude__hi]

building the frame and chassis of the robot without having Dr. Cameron telling us to do it over and change this and that...

oh...a few weeks before build season we built an air cannon and loaded a pcv pipe with a cone on it and accidently shot a perfectly circular hole into a ceiling tile..

[s_forbes]

Originally Posted by BHS_STopping

Incidentally, our team highlight probably had to be the accident in the chem lab, right before we left for our workplace.

Basically, one of our electronics guys accidentally broke one of the faucets in the chemistry lab. And when I say break, I mean he snapped the thing clean off of the pipe. Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the thing gushed about four feet into the air without stopping. Then our teacher ran in, panicing. Well, at least we had a plumber on hand before we had the chance to turn the school into an aquarium...

That was by far the most entertaining thing I've seen all year! He'll never hear the end of it. My car crash en route to our new building facility was rather amusing, too.

And we thought we'd just be building robots...

[BHS_STopping]

The look on Heller's face was priceless, after all.

But honestly, who designs an intersection like that?

[AndyB]

my personal high so far this build season has to be the fact that im usually a webmaster, but this year, im doing the inventor award as well. Its kind of cool to have all of the head mechanical people and our engineers coming to me for things. for us, the web team is kind of an independant project, so i really never met many of the mentors. but it feels so cool to know everything that is going on, and for once, contributing some ideas. yes, i have stooped to the level of mechanical

[Alan Anderson]

One of the early highlights for me was watching a couple of the students repeatedly hitting the target with impressive precision using a prototype ball shooter a few days after kickoff.

The "target" was another student.

[Nuttyman54]

first, some background: part of the parking lot at our school is used for motorcycle certification classes on the weekends. our team uses the lot for practice.

The highlight: getting the entire motorcycle class to stop and watch our prototype launcher fire a barrage of poofballs...

[Kim Masi]

I think our team's highlight so far this year is how much our team has grown

last year we had about 15-20 students tops. This year we have grown to 45+!!
It's also incredible how everyone is working really hard and putting forth their opinion and best effort.

Also, the amount of our engineers/mentors has grown too. We have gained a spanish teacher, a tech ed teacher from the middle school, and about 5 new UTC Power engineers!

Its really awesome seeing how much we've grown

[Billfred]

The early highlight thus far has been that we have a corner goal built, and a platform and center goal in the works. And we have carpet, courtesy of USC and a state government person officially declaring it junk, that we'll be able to test on. (Never before has 1293 built as much of the field.)

[sciencenerd]

My best memory on the team so far this year would have to be while we were building our prototype shooter. One of our mentors dropped a dab of hot glue on the table accidentally, and a senior on the team happened to notice it. The mentor said "careful, it's hot", to which the student boldly replied "no it's not!" and reached out to wipe the glue off the table. He touched it, got burned, and exclaimed "Ow!". The whole team kind of burst into spontaneous laughter, as this isn't typical of this particular student, he is usually very responsible and listens to directions.

[ICE MAN]

Originally Posted by BHS_STopping

Obviously, the FIRST Competition isn't all about robots. It's actually got a lot to do with making new friends and just having a great time with your team (Or even enjoying a few funny moments). So, I was just wondering if anyone here would like to share some experiences (Good or bad, overly serious or extremely hysterical) that your team has encountered during this year's build season.

this year it would have to be when we started to test our pro-type shooter. so we were in the hall and shooting the poof ball about 25-30 feet. so we were probably doing this for about 30 minutes when two of our trusty janitors showed up. so we started shooting the poof ball again. then the janitors started to kick the balls back to us in soccer form. at one point they almost hit our principle. needless to say they vanished and we stopped after that. this so far has been the funniest yet. its not that funny but i guess you just had to be there.

[mikeday51]

I'd say one of the highlights so far was when we coaxed one of the girls into the path of our shooter (we told her it was off) only to hit her with 16 shots in less than two seconds. She then chased me with a hammer but it was worth it...

[Rick TYler]

That's easy. We work in the school's woodshop. Above each workstation is a sign saying "STATION 3" (or 1, 2, or 6 -- you get the point). With the very first shot from the prototype shooter that my son built we hit the "STATION 4" sign with pinpoint accuracy and knocked it from the wires holding it up. The sign was up high and across the lab -- outside of the range we thought possible with our primitive plywood prototype. Much laughter and a fair amount of giddiness ensued.

[Marissa Leach]

I would have to say being a rookie team that we have had alot of highlights this season already. But one of the funniest ones was yesterday when our mentor asked whether we had any questions. WE pretty much stared blankly at her. Then she forced us all to right down any questions we had (making the slightly fatal mistake of saying that there were no dumb questions...) and one girl asked which came first, the chicken or the egg. So we had this big discussion, and my sister and I both have always had a different view on it. So we were sitting there debating and even continued our conversation at home.

oh, and also being promised by our other mentor that he would wear a pink tux at the competition...

=M