this thread is for any one who has success stories, won awards, or are record holders for the year 2008 (overdrive).
I would like to have people post from all over the country (or world for that matter) a simple post stating what awards, records or stories you have will suffice, any private messages you would like to add are welcome. oh- also state your team name and number, school name, and what have you. congratulations to all winners/record holders. I know this is a little pre-emptive so i would like to have the stories keep coming. ATL is still off in the distance but there are already teams that know they are going. 1647 (my team) went to the trenton regional and the PHL regional and we saw some very deserving winners there. so congratulations and good luck folks!! (rookie posts are encouraged- i love to hear inspiring rookie wins!!!)
We have been very fortunate to have won 6 awards at VCU and the Hawaii regionals.
The Chairman’s was the icing on the cake.
We have also been fortunate to have added another finalist and/or regional winner to our team history.
Only in 2006, have we not made a finals match, considering for our first 5 years, we only did one regional per year.
2008 VCU Entrepreneurship Award
2008 VCU Website Award
2008 VCU Motorola Quality Award
2008 Hawai Entrepreneurship Award
2008 Hawaii Regional Finalist
2008 Hawaii Chairman’s Award.
we won the rookie all-star award at glr and the team spirit award at the kettering pilot rookie competition
we were lucky enought to win the las vegs regional, chairmans, and are mentor got woody flowers
dude I don’t mean to rain on your parade but most teams do not win an award. 
Doing an “in your face” thread with 14 exclamation points in the title isn’t really GP.
FIRST isn’t really about the awards. it’s not even about the competition. it’s about the road to the regional.
Awards exist to help create a sense of achievement and accomplishment - they exist so that we all have something to aspire to. :o
Good job though! 6 awards is pretty impressive!
-Leav
p.s.
Just think about the team who worked their butts off but didn’t get any awards… how does this thread make them feel?
Won the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award at FLR, for our reliable Hybrid mode and neat controls deck. Thanks to the design team and the student/robocoach and the mentor, that worked and tested the hybrid mode 4 weeks.
We fully completly changed our winch desing between our practice matches 1 and 2 and it worked even though having the two motors being attached with zipties but having one ziptie break right at the end of the long time practice match(5min) and then getting it bolted to the bot before our 3rd.
Last year, we started a new community competition robotics club and had three mentors and five students. We built an FTC robot and went to the finals in the first Washington tournament. This year, with four students not returning to the team, we recruited 20 new students and four new mentors, and entered three teams in the Washington tournament. All three of our robots worked well, and any of them could have been in the finals of the event – all did go to the semis and one to the finals. Team 417 was the #1 rated robot after qualifying, and Team 418 was #2.
For a bunch of rookies, they did amazingly well. I am so proud of them you can probably see me smiling right over the Internet. :]
We lifted the entire field… :rolleyes:
We also won Safety and Imagery. 
I’d partially agree with this. If you look, copperhead didnt say his team won any awards. He is asking for stories of others success. You need to celebrate the success of others. In my opinion, one of the best ways to improve your team is by observing others. If Copperhead would have just bragged about his team only, it would be different. Also, he asks for stories. I’m sure if your team didnt win an award you still have a story you could share.
Now about my team…
We won Chairmans in WI. We were very happy all our hard work paid off.
We also had this. The week after WI, we went to Buckeye and we didnt win a single award. We were all very happy though, we had fun and we felt like we were noticed at the tournament.
Joey
We won the hard hat pins at SVR for getting the most safety tokens, and although I don’t want to take anything away from the team that did win the Safety Award, I believe we would have won that, too, if we hadn’t won it last year :yikes:
And even if you didn’t win any awards, every team that competed (hopefully) has something to be proud of. It’s not all about awards…
Team 1625 (Winnovation) received the following awards:
Midwest Regional:
Judges Award
Autodesk Visualization Award
Regional Semi-Finalist (delivering 1114 their only elimination defeat :eek: )
Wisconsin Regional:
GM Industrial Design Award
Regional Semi-Finalist
Colorado Regional:
Regional Champions
Engineering Inspiration Award
We made it through a 17th year in FIRST.
As 4 others teams can attest to, that’s really hard to do.
Congratulations to our fellow flagship teams for sticking with the program through thick and thin and showing all the “newbies” how it’s done.
oh.
and we won our second regional ever in our history…
Team 910’s accomplishments for the season were.
WMR
Semifinalists, thanks to 1504 and 2337.
And we were quite thrilled that Mr. John Crombe won the WFA. He deserves it for all the work he’s put into making the team what it is today.
GLR-
Judges Award for our robotics class.
Finalists, thanks to teams 66 and 217.
And our own personal achievement. We had a working robot right out of the crate at WMR and it is one of the best robots we’ve ever had. I am incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished this year.
We won GP at Davis, an award which I humbly believe we truly earned. When we go to the competition our neighbor (2633?) Deer Valley High School, uncrated their robot and what came out made me speechless. Because they were a rookie team They really had no idea about the basics of FIRST that we all have memorized. They brought a 38x38 (base dimensions) robot with all white wires, a misconstructed scissor lift (ball knock off only), and three members. My phrasing in this description is not to degrade the amazing effort put forward by this rookie team, but to fully convey the degree of work that had to be done on their robot. First thing that happened on thursday was we gave them Joe, our electrical/manufacturing guy. He is no pawn, loosing him from our pit was a huge blow to the success of our robot, ultimately causing its inability to compete by the end of the competition. However, I believe it was the right decision. He spent more time in their pit then in our own. Our tools became more Deer Valley’s then ours.
Dougherty Valley was a new school in our area, built to lower class sizes at all the surrounding schools. This was their first year open so they only had sophomores and freshmen. Our past Mentor, Mr. Jackson, started teaching at that school for several complicated reasons and obviously had to start a team there. With all new members, a new school, and being rookie year, it was amazing the quality robot that they produced. While just a simple box robot it was well and elegantly constructed, only encountering one burning electrical issue (pun intended). But none of the kids nor the adults, nor Mr. Jackson new how to program. So when they got here they asked us. This meant our programmer had to write code for three different robot simultaneously! He did however pull it off, but we had to sacrifice our hopes for getting our IR board to work.
By the end of friday our whole team went home laughing that The teams we helped ended up having better robots then us, do to several things breaking in our electronics (loss of Joe) which led to an out of control robot that broke our manipulator. Deer Valley got their scissor lift working largely due to the efforts of Joe and of an adult for a team that I have forgotten, I have a guess but I fear being wrong. Dougherty was in 11th place, running their robot well as defensive lap bot mix. We had E-stopped every match.
Saturday Qualifications went very much the same. We had issues with our robot, and we spent a lot of time helping the other teams. By Selections we had stripped mostly everything off our robot in frustration and it was clear to us we would not be picked. Neither was Deer Valley OR Dougherty. I remember congratulating Dougherty on their amazing rookie season, and that getting 10th place was no feat to be coughed at. Boy was I wrong in thinking the night was over.
As 1458 (us) and 2390 (Dougherty) went up into the stands and watched the elims, we laughed and cheered until the semis rolled around. A announcement came over the PA system “Will a representative from the drive team of 2390 please see pit Admin”. It took me a second to realize that 2390 was first on replacement and that 1072 had just suffered a huge issue. When I turned around, half the 2390 team and our drive team were all running down to the field. They were told that they may need to replace 1072. Well 1072 played 3 more matches so we thought that it was a false alarm, until Finals match one when 2390 appared on the field. So at that point both us and team 1516 (another local high school) rushed to the field to cheer on Dougherty. In between cheers we would pass advice to the novice drive team. Reminding them to stay inside the lines and such. By the end of the two matches we were all horse. Then we won GP which was a great surprise since we didn’t do any of the little things I call award beggers. Such as first aid kits for Safety award, or team awards for GP. If your still reading this, you must be really bored! But thanks
enjoyed the story very much !!
Well I know that as a first year mentor, I personally had an interesting year. We had two students work through the entire design process basically by themselves and they learned a ton. Six people got to have the taste of being on the field during a match, all of whom had a blast. We worked our butts off with fund raising to attend two regionals this year. We managed to go to our first ever practice event and had a lot of fun. Our programmer got to become a builder for four out of the six weeks and then got to have his autonomous code score more points in a single match than our robot did all of last year(excluding climbing ramps). We have many graduating seniors, one of whom was steered into a career with animation because of being part of FIRST. We learned a ton this year and had a great time doing it.
Sorry if bragging about these accomplishments is a bad thing in anyone’s eyes but I am too proud of all the hard working kids I had the privilege of mentoring this year to not brag about the great things they did. I’ve been a driver for 3 exciting regional finals but seeing our team grow so much this year makes it my favorite year in FIRST. Congrats to all you guys on those awards too! Great work!
If you asked someone from our community about our team, they’d probably tell you how the ÜberBots won the CT Regional for the third consecutive year, seeding first and going undefeated for all three days. If they were really astute, they might even tell you about how we won the Entrepreneurship Award at the CT Regional for all of our community work.
Sure, winning sounds great at the event - who doesn’t like to win? - but that’s not the first thing I would think of if you asked me for our team’s biggest success story over the years. The reason why I mentioned community recognition in the first paragraph, and the reason why we got the Entrepreneurship Award - the way we have grown and spread ourselves through the community over the years - is the thing I am most proud of.
Our team started as a small group, with maybe 12 students, back in 2003. Everyone who joined the team was interested in building the robot, and that’s all. We had minimal sponsorship, and if you asked anyone in our town about us… they would have no idea what that robotics thing you mentioned is. 2006 was really when we started our team growth. By that year we had 24 students, and a decent number of sponsors. We started to get involved in the community, bringing the robot to the elementary schools in the town and to other public events. “ÜberBots” still wasn’t really a key word for Avonians, but a few people knew who we were.
Throughout the 2006, 2007, and 2008 seasons, our team has exploded. We’ve held dozens of community events and many demonstrations for elementary and middle school students to help to get them interested in science and technology. In the 2008 season alone, we’ve reached almost **3000 **students with our presentations. A large group of eighth graders who want to join our team next year came to watch us at the Connecticut Regional this year. At our most recent fundraiser, dozens of families from our town came to meet our robot, Lightning, and our team members. We brought a scrapbook and video from the competitions to show everyone what FIRST is about, and we taught kids how to drive our robot around. Not only does our town know all about the ÜberBots, people from adjacent towns, and far-off family members and their aquaitances know lots about our team. We now have 36 team members, whose interests vary from fundraising to spirit to CAD to programming to art to spirit to mechanical to leadership and beyond.
The thing that means the most to me… it’s those 3000 kids, their parents, everyone our team is able to reach with our message of inspiration. The way their faces light up when they see our robot… that’s the greatest feeling in the world to me. The smiles and the laughter, the fascinated questions, and the desire for them to become a part of it all… that couldn’t be replaced by 10,000 trophies.
I am incredibly proud of our team for being able to get involved in people’s lives and change them so much for the better; for being able to inspire people to follow their dreams, and this is the success story I want to share with the FIRST community. I want to thank FIRST for the impact it has made on my life, and I am so glad that I have the opportunity to pass it on to others. I hope that everyone else can have the amazing experience of being a role model and an inspiration to others.
We built another cool looking robot that got recognized! That’s all I care about!
I’m also proud of my team for submitting its first Chairmen’s Award in our 13 year history. We didn’t win, but we put forth a great effort and did a lot of great things to deserve it.
We also submitted a WFA submission to honor our lead advisor, who had been with the team since its begining and had taught in our district for an amazing 40 years. She didn’t get the award, but we gave her our submission and that was good enough!
We also made it into both FIRST: Behind the Design Books. Which I regard as our team’s crowning acomplishment. Its a pitty they aren’t making one for '08, since we were looking forward to making another submission.
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we were eliminated in the semis of the GTR in a 3rd and final match decided by 2 points.
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we were drubbed in the finals of Waterloo by 2056, 1114 and 1680
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we failed to qualify for Atlanta this year via EI or RCA, both of which he had a “pretty good” chance at
YET
… last night our students celebrated like we’d just won the Superbowl …
I can’t explain it, but there was a beaming smile on each and every one of their faces. They laughed, sang, reminisced about the season(s) past, and spoke of all the amazing things still to be done in the future.
If that’s not braggable, I don’t know what is.