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.
We actually had a great session last Friday
It all started about an hour before we were supposed to end.
Freddy challenged us that we wouldn’t have a running shooting mechanism so we set out to prove him wrong. He bribed us the astronomical sum of…
$5 (if we made it) :yikes:
So we began working like a well oiled machine. Probably better than we ever have. We worked so well, our adviser Mr.B let us stay until 7:00 witch made Freddy sweat. :ahh:
In the end we finished mounting the motors and the wheels are ready to be mounted.
He claims we lost, but we won because we have achieved to a new level of team unity.
Wait a minute could that be what he was planning the whole time?
Could the whole thing be an elaborate plot to make us work together?..
Na
(Thanks Freddy)
Week 1 Highlight: Watching Neha sit in the corner with the robot on her lap and working on it.
Highlight: watching our team mentor talk at 50 words/second when he got excited about the robot.
Example:
-“And then we can do this! And then this! And omg omg omg!!!”
-"…chill out…it’s not that serious"
-“no IT’S SO COOL. it’s awesome man!”
it’s great to have mentors enthusiastic about what we are doing. They turn back into 2 year olds. =)
Ours would have to be the free-range hamster farms that our team decided to start up next summer, and plans to run a robot on hamster power. I guess that’s a little random…
Our thre best highlights from this year so far are both from yesterday.
One being the fact that we spent more time having snowball fights and POOF ball fights then actually working on the robot.
The second being the fact that we moved our practice facilities out of an abandoned elementary field Cafetorium to and abandoned storefront in the local mall.
the third will be posted in picture form later. It’s pretty ghetto.
JT
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The highlight for me was last friday. At dinner 1 of our mentors dared me to eat 6 Premium Plus crackers in 1 minute with no water. It’s hard to do for those of you who have never done it!! And then another mentor dared me to finish it off by eating 5 packets of sugar in a row. I ate the crackers and wripped open the 5 packets of sugar and ate them all at once. It was crazy!! I was hyper the whole night 
The next day I had sooooooo much sugar that the team is now going to ban me from eating any more of it. Let’s just say that the build season is very unhealthy for me :rolleyes:
playing this on loop in the build room
having the guy in charge of the wireless block as a programmer is good. 
BANG BANG BANG 
WOW there are just tooo many but one of the most recent ones was yesterday we went to CiCi’s and one of the students put his head next to the window from the video game area and was starin at us and when a kid wanted to go in his dad was tooo scared and told him to wait HAHAHAHAHA LOL
best moment for me so far would have to be last friday ( or two weeks ago i cant remember! ) a parent brought in bbq ribs for dinner that night. we took pictures of all our members AND mentors with bbq sauce all over their faces and hands . i have two videos too!
Ha, well, definently the odd, spontaneous dialouges that seem to occur every year, without the intention of those involved. You know, like…well, I don’t want to ruin it.
I pretty much enjoyed when I told the kids that before we ship the robot, they have to make me understand how it works. They laughed at first until they realized I was serious. Then they stood there, horrified. Eventually they began telling me about it.
So far the highlights of the build season are my animation girls are doing an incredible job and I barely had to look over their shoulder. The team has shown incredible team spirit and in spite of not reaching our scheduled goal (we wanted a working prototype as of yesterday) we are still making incredible progress.
Hopefully this will be the year we break the pattern (since I’ve been here we’ve had great odd numbered years and struggled in the even numbered years).
Our advisor letting us shoot POOF balls at each other, granted we were wearing our safety goggles :rolleyes:
Our electronics team is ahead of the mechanical team.
Seriously… I’ve got the camera tracking the target, the gyro keeping the robot straight… it’s an amazing thing.
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…
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?
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… :yikes:
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…
The look on Heller’s face was priceless, after all.
But honestly, who designs an intersection like that?