101 Things I Wish I'd Known Before My First FIRST Tournament

[afowl]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Murphy was a genius, the only time you cant connect to program your controller will be in the pits, at nationals, before your last match.

I just had to quote this. Team 1089 at Nationals this year is proof of this if there ever was. Despite all of the random non robot things that went wrong, our cRio died. Thankfully another team let us borrow one they just won and we went to upload the code and our programming laptop died. But our smart programmers backed it up on a flash drive... which they lost... so they had to reprogram the robot on Friday night. There's a whole thread about this somewhere. We ended up losing every match except for the one our cRio died in which we tied... this leads to my tip.

It doesn't matter what goes wrong as long as you have fun. We all thought this was one of our best trips, even though we were second to last in our divison.

[Dragon Princess]

a robot is nothing like a race car, trust me i thought so, i had no idea where the spark plugs had to go...until someone pointed out their were no spark plugs lolz.

when your parents join your robotics team its not a bad thing, you get to have a bit more freedom on trips, and you can have takeout meals that are different from the teams, who doesn't love getting Chinese food or a grilled cheese after about most the build was all about pizza that you couldn't really stand anymore. Don't get me wrong i love pizza, but the Pizza hut near our build spot burns the pizza, and no where else will take a phone call from the school for the deaf seriously.

[LadyinthePit]

I have a couple to add if it's not too late. This year was my first (and last as a student) I learned a couple valuable lessons:

-Know EVERYTHING about your robot because as long as you're wearing your team name you're fair game for questions.

-When someone asks what language your programmers speak don't answer English (that was my rookie mistake to the Judges...somehow we still got Engineering Inspiration)

-People want to hear about your robot from you so don't be shy and let the mentors talk because frankly no one at the regional really cares what they have to say (Don't get me wrong I love our mentors but the senators, business execs, and misc. fans want to hear about how the program impacts students)

-Oh and you can never have enough buttons.