Denver anyone

[Lil' Lavery]

Congrats to all the teams at the Colorado Regional. It was a lot of fun to watch from the DU stands. If your regional grows next year itll probably need a place other than a hockey stadium(a tad bit small, but definately a great view and a lot of fun.). I hope it stays in the Ritchie Center though, the VIP room is great (isnt it fun to be Dave Lavery's son?)
FIRST, the only place where the VIPs wear safety goggles.

That #1 alliance was amazing. No offense to the rest of the teams, but with 233 and 118 on the same alliance, nobody really stood a chance.

[MasonMM]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

That #1 alliance was amazing. No offense to the rest of the teams, but with 233 and 118 on the same alliance, nobody really stood a chance.

It was an amazing alliance, but can't leave out 935, they were awesome. But we (118) had a speed controller blow out during the semi's so we lost control of turret, which slowed down our capping speed a bit, but the alliance still prevailed in the end. I've gotta say the last finals match was extremely excited though. I loved it.

[gburlison]

Originally Posted by MasonMM

It was an amazing alliance, but can't leave out 935, they were awesome. But we (118) had a speed controller blow out during the semi's so we lost control of turret, which slowed down our capping speed a bit, but the alliance still prevailed in the end. I've gotta say the last finals match was extremely excited though. I loved it.

Were you working on the speed controller while 1448 was working on their chain between the first and second semi match? And what was deal with your human player? I never quite figured that one out.

[MasonMM]

yeah, we had to drop the Control's box in the middle of the field to trouble shoot why it wouldn't work. We thought we had fixed it when we found a skeptical PWM cable and replaced... but we had no luck after putting the box back in... although it's a nice feature to have all of our controls in a box that is very organized, it turned out to be a tad of a pain when rushed to fix something in the middle of the field. But right after we were able to take our robot back to the pits after the finals ended, we replaced the speed controller, and everything worked like normal.So we are ready for houston. Even without our turret, our drivers did a great job adjusting during the semi and final matches to the new strategy.

As for the human player delima... we were only able to send 3 students to the competition in denver... something about school distric policy and out of state trips and some other issues... so every match we had to "rent a kid" to stand in as our human player and keep the robot enabled, even though we never used the human player during any of the matches. It went fine until the elimanation matches when the adminstration told us we had to have them in robonaut's attire. Giving up the shirt on a mentor's back we were able to solve that and have a legal stand in for the remaining competition.

[Winged Wonder]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

233 has the rare perspective on this argument being that they won both the regional championship and the regional Chairman's award.
So which one excites you guys more?
And congratulations on winning both.

Okay, I’m a little biased because i was the Student Project Manager for Chairman's Award for two years in a row, but for this instance, initially the entire team was psyched out at being the FIRST (no pun intended) seeded team at TWO regional event and to bring home the gold at both. that’s not very common, and its the first time our team has ever pulled off something like that.

When it comes to our Chairman's Award submission... I was extremely nervous before they announced the winner. This was two years in the making. When I picked up the project my freshman year, I didn’t really have all the data I needed so I had to do a little research on my own team (it didn’t help that it was also my first year on the team) and last year I ended up scrapping the entire submission together in a hasty 7 straight hours... I’m so glad it didn’t come to that again this year, but it was a good lesson to learn: DON'T PROCRASTINATE!! This year we got started early, and I got some friends on the team to help me out with research and actually writing the essay segment... there is no way our submission could have come together without them! (thank you chairman's award group~) the new format of the submission made things a little interesting.. easier in some aspects, a little harder in others (i.e. creating collages with tons of PINK in them without making them too large of a JPEG... good thing I am the unofficial Graphics Manager too) but all-in-all, despite how much time and effort everyone has put into the team itself over the past 7 or 8 years total, I still had that little knot in my stomach, because I knew there are teams more deserving, and if we didn’t win, I’d be the first so stand and congratulate them personally. But seeing as while they were describing the winner all of our criteria was being met, I kept squeezing the hand of one of my friends (in all honesty I don’t know who it was ^^; I think it was Danielle but I might be wrong) harder and harder until it came up to the part with the body paint, in which everyone knew it was us and I ended up sobbing on the way up to thank the judges. (yea, the little brunette with the light pink beanie on with a constant stream of tears running down her cheeks… that was me ^^; ) When we presented on Friday I had just finished becoming pinkedified and we were actually a bit late for our presentation because we had just had a match, so when we finally walked in, I couldn’t exactly shake anyone’s hands unless they wanted pink on their hands… (I still haven’t gotten all of the body paint off) So obviously in my eyes, winning Chairman’s Award was more rewarding, considering that I not only helped put together our entire submission, I had worked on almost every aspect of the team to try and help spread the teachings of FIRST.

However, if I had made a driver position this year (I’m basically a back-up arm operator, since I spend a great deal of the 6-week build period driving our practice bot) I don’t know what I’d be more excited about, since I had actually helped drive us to victory and I had also worked my butt off with the Chairman’s Award.

As my brother said, I really believe it depends on the individual. Winning the actual FIRST Robotics competition is awesome, because it exemplifies your excellence in different fields of engineering, programming, and mechanics, and awards the skills of your pit crew and drivers. But winning the most prestigious award in FIRST, the Chairman’s Award, that honor is bestowed upon your entire team, members new and old, for they all have contributed to the great success in your team in exemplifying first-hand the true meaning of what it is to be a member of FIRST.

This is a little more than my usual two cents, so thanks for reading. And excuse any stupidity in my sentence structure… I just woke up (our flight didn’t leave at midnight like they promised, but rather at 2am) and after being awake for about 30 hours straight (I barely slept on the plane… turbulence was bad…and I didn’t even take a nap before going to church on Easter Sunday) I totally crashed. I’m still not 100% awake, but I must say this: I miss Colorado! the snow was so much fun, and I love the weather there! I was in board shorts and a t-shirt most of the time, and it felt really nice. (those of you there might remember us making a make-shift ghetto sled and “sledding” down a hill outside of the Richie Center) heehee.. now I’m seriously considering going to college there… Thank you everyone there for an awesome time.

(and btw… I walked right past Dave Lavery while giving out team awards and was too scared to even say “hi.” ^^; but really.. how would it sound to come up to someone like Dave and say, “hi, I’m Leslie but you probably know me better as Winged Wonder. Anyways, I just wanted to say I’m so excited to actually meet you and I wanted to thank you for helping pave the road for people like me who wish to become astronauts when they get older and go to Mars!” lol yea.. I’ve gotta stop being shy like that… something similar to that happened at UCF with Woody Flowers…)

[Masterfork]

Originally Posted by Winged Wonder

Okay, I’m a little biased because i was the Student Project Manager for Chairman's Award for two years in a row, but for this instance, initially the entire team was psyched out at being the FIRST (no pun intended) seeded team at TWO regional event and to bring home the gold at both. that’s not very common, and its the first time our team has ever pulled off something like that.

When it comes to our Chairman's Award submission... I was extremely nervous before they announced the winner. This was two years in the making. When I picked up the project my freshman year, I didn’t really have all the data I needed so I had to do a little research on my own team (it didn’t help that it was also my first year on the team) and last year I ended up scrapping the entire submission together in a hasty 7 straight hours... I’m so glad it didn’t come to that again this year, but it was a good lesson to learn: DON'T PROCRASTINATE!! This year we got started early, and I got some friends on the team to help me out with research and actually writing the essay segment... there is no way our submission could have come together without them! (thank you chairman's award group~) the new format of the submission made things a little interesting.. easier in some aspects, a little harder in others (i.e. creating collages with tons of PINK in them without making them too large of a JPEG... good thing I am the unofficial Graphics Manager too) but all-in-all, despite how much time and effort everyone has put into the team itself over the past 7 or 8 years total, I still had that little knot in my stomach, because I knew there are teams more deserving, and if we didn’t win, I’d be the first so stand and congratulate them personally. But seeing as while they were describing the winner all of our criteria was being met, I kept squeezing the hand of one of my friends (in all honesty I don’t know who it was ^^; I think it was Danielle but I might be wrong) harder and harder until it came up to the part with the body paint, in which everyone knew it was us and I ended up sobbing on the way up to thank the judges. (yea, the little brunette with the light pink beanie on with a constant stream of tears running down her cheeks… that was me ^^; ) When we presented on Friday I had just finished becoming pinkedified and we were actually a bit late for our presentation because we had just had a match, so when we finally walked in, I couldn’t exactly shake anyone’s hands unless they wanted pink on their hands… (I still haven’t gotten all of the body paint off) So obviously in my eyes, winning Chairman’s Award was more rewarding, considering that I not only helped put together our entire submission, I had worked on almost every aspect of the team to try and help spread the teachings of FIRST.

However, if I had made a driver position this year (I’m basically a back-up arm operator, since I spend a great deal of the 6-week build period driving our practice bot) I don’t know what I’d be more excited about, since I had actually helped drive us to victory and I had also worked my butt off with the Chairman’s Award.

As my brother said, I really believe it depends on the individual. Winning the actual FIRST Robotics competition is awesome, because it exemplifies your excellence in different fields of engineering, programming, and mechanics, and awards the skills of your pit crew and drivers. But winning the most prestigious award in FIRST, the Chairman’s Award, that honor is bestowed upon your entire team, members new and old, for they all have contributed to the great success in your team in exemplifying first-hand the true meaning of what it is to be a member of FIRST.

This is a little more than my usual two cents, so thanks for reading. And excuse any stupidity in my sentence structure… I just woke up (our flight didn’t leave at midnight like they promised, but rather at 2am) and after being awake for about 30 hours straight (I barely slept on the plane… turbulence was bad…and I didn’t even take a nap before going to church on Easter Sunday) I totally crashed. I’m still not 100% awake, but I must say this: I miss Colorado! the snow was so much fun, and I love the weather there! I was in board shorts and a t-shirt most of the time, and it felt really nice. (those of you there might remember us making a make-shift ghetto sled and “sledding” down a hill outside of the Richie Center) heehee.. now I’m seriously considering going to college there… Thank you everyone there for an awesome time.

(and btw… I walked right past Dave Lavery while giving out team awards and was too scared to even say “hi.” ^^; but really.. how would it sound to come up to someone like Dave and say, “hi, I’m Leslie but you probably know me better as Winged Wonder. Anyways, I just wanted to say I’m so excited to actually meet you and I wanted to thank you for helping pave the road for people like me who wish to become astronauts when they get older and go to Mars!” lol yea.. I’ve gotta stop being shy like that… something similar to that happened at UCF with Woody Flowers…)

yeah lesl it was a very good competition for driver and operator and if i worked on the chairmans award and made driver i would have definatly been pshyced but i am very happy we won the award and even more that you helped make it happen even if i wasn't the operator, i would have still been psyched

[ksnowman62]

As my brother said, I really believe it depends on the individual. Winning the actual FIRST Robotics competition is awesome, because it exemplifies your excellence in different fields of engineering, programming, and mechanics, and awards the skills of your pit crew and drivers. But winning the most prestigious award in FIRST, the Chairman’s Award, that honor is bestowed upon your entire team, members new and old, for they all have contributed to the great success in your team in exemplifying first-hand the true meaning of what it is to be a member of FIRST.

I spent alot of time working on this year's robot and even though I am excited to see our team succeed on the field, I am definitely more proud of our team winning the Chairman's award. I think that shows the efforts our team has made and the potential it has to keep growing in the FIRST community.

-Kelly

[Termite233]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

233 has the rare perspective on this argument being that they won both the regional championship and the regional Chairman's award.
So which one excites you guys more?
And congratulations on winning both.

It's better winning the chairman's award...more prestigious...not that I would complain about the championship or anything...