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Second to last competition of the season, and we have one State Qualified Team! We had a few hiccups here and there; team C had a faulty solenoid and the missing keys were an issue again, but overall, it was a good competition for us. At the end of Qualifiers: 4.) 7316D 4-1-0 (8/62) 10.) 7316A 3-2-0 (6/87) 14.) 7316E 3-2-0 (6/58) 18.) 7316C 3-2-0 (6/48) 38.) 7316B 0-5-0 (0/81) For the first time this year, all five teams made it to Alliance selections. Unfortunately, they were all eliminated in Quarter Finals, but we all walked back to the pits satisfied with our efforts. And about an hour of 'Motorcycles and Merry-Go-Rounds' videos and Trivia Crack later, it was time for awards. Not only did Firestone take home the Design Award for 7316C's log, which was a State Qualifier, team 7316A was awarded the Sportsmanship Award and 7316D received the Judges Award! Also a good turn for us, after the competition the judges spoke to a few of us personally and commended us on how lovely ALL the logs from Firestone are. When I have time, I'd like to make a post with all the pictures of our logs together, I feel like each one reflects it's own team. Next weekend, we have the Zane State II Qualifier, which is the last competition to qualify for States in Ohio.
Good Luck to all teams competing! ~Erica Kraus Club Secretary VEX does this really cool thing where you can track matches in real time on their site! Each competition has its own Robot Events Page, so here's the one for the Cleveland State Competition that is taking place right now:
CLICK HERE Qualification Rounds are about to begin! All five team have passed inspection. In case you are unaware of how competitions work, here's a rundown: Every team is required to pass an inspection that usually consists of a check to make sure your robot meets the 18"x18"x18" maximum size requirement, a check on your VEXnet (autonomous and driver control), and making sure all your parts are legal and within regulations. After inspection, the qualification rounds will commence. These are matches in which your alliance and your opponents are randomly generated by a computer, and each team usually has between four and six of these matches. Qualification matches decided the rankings for Alliance Selection. Scores are calculated by win-draw-lose, and while wins are the highest scoring points, there are also skill-points, or SPs, that are calculated based on how you match up against your opponent. For instance, if you lose 6-37, you were clearly not on the same level as your opponent, and you still lose, but you get higher skill points than a match that you lost 35-37. After Qualification Matches, the top teams get 'first dibs' on who they want to align with, and they take turns (based upon the winner's hierarchy) choosing their alliances. Each alliance is usually either two or three teams, depending on the size of the competition. At this point, teams not chosen for alliances are eliminated from the competition. Game Over. These teams that are selected as Alliances move on to the Finals. Finals matches are won by winning 2 out of 3 games in a standard bracket face-off. Winner moves on to the next bracket until the final two alliances meet each other in a showdown. Same deal, two out of three games for the win, and the winner is the Tournament Champion. Usually, at local tournaments (at least in Ohio), the winning alliance of the tournament is awarded with qualification for State Competition. Other awards that may qualify a team for States vary from tournament to tournament, but usually are one or both of the Excellence Award and the Design award. The Excellence Award is awarded based upon robot performance, interview quality, design and engineering log. The Design Award is awarded based upon the overall design process employed during the course of the season, and is mainly judged and awarded by the engineering log. ~ Erica Kraus Club Secretary And we're off to the Cleveland Competition!
Its currently 7:24, we're all on a yellow school bus, so far have sung 'Call Me Maybe' and 'Call Me Maybe', and decided that the white girl trifecta are Sarah Edwards, Carissa Eplin and Steven Edwards. Congrats to the winners of that vote. By posting this post, it is now 'so canon, it's sourced', according to Alex and Haley. So we're having a lot of fun already, and that's a good sign. Maybe it's just a matter of it not being 3am. Maybe we all are just in snyc again. We've just got a real good vibe going, so I think we're gonna walk into this one kicking. Here we go! ***Also, thank you so much to everyone that's voted for our website! I haven't had much time to keep up with the blog, but we're gonna be working harder on staying up to date. Thanks for putting us in the lead by community votes! We all appreciate your support. ~Erica Kraus Club Secretary Whew-ee, that was a rough competition. Unfortunately for us, there were only 4 slots left open when we registered, so we had a big decision to make; which team to divide or leave behind. We all agreed that it would be unfair to leave people behind, so we made the decision to have each team take one or two of the remaining team, which would turn out to be team 7316D. Early in the morning, we trudged onto the bus and quickly proceeded to pass out as we drove the two or so hours to Zanesville. I'd be lying if I said the trip there was encouraging, it wasn't awful, it was just a sleepy bus of pure exhaustion, and in my experience, sleeping on the way to a competition leaves you groggy, short tempered and a wee bit crabby when you wake up-not exactly the best combination for working as a team. Unfortunately, travel is NOT something we can control, so we can merely do our best to work through our moods when we wake up. When we got there, we set up in our classroom, and my experience of bus sleep held quite true; irritable engineering kids. So we tried as best we could to work well, but we were also very unprepared. The past week leading up to this was Midterms, for both us and the students in our club that are taking college courses in post-secondary. If that's not enough to make people crabby, I don't know what is. Inspection went fine, and the driver's meeting went well, but it was immediately after that that things started to go sideways. Team B's first few matches were decent, but they pulled a wire during a match, and that became a recurring issue. Team C had some internal issues, causing their driver to be defaulted to another member of their team who had very little experience on this particular robot. Team E's robot refused to move. All four teams were sharing the same two sets of VEXnet Keys, and let me tell you, THAT took some juggling. The moment one team's match ended, they would pull their keys, even before the match was done being calculated, to pass them off to the next team. The only team that seemed to be in good health was Team A, who made Alliance Selections and eventually reached quarter-finals. As they continued to compete, a good grouping of some member from all the other teams enjoyed a meeting of the minds. This competition had stressed everyone out so much, that our group dynamics that are usually our proudest aspect, were in very sorry shape. An optional group de-stress session was in order, students found an empty study room tucked away near the cafeteria, and mandatory quiet time was enacted. It didn't last long as we began to slowly sift through our laundry list of issues.
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AuthorsAnyone who posts should sign off their name, you can find more about us in the 'About Us' section. This is the overall club blog, full of our usual shenanigans and plots and schemes and occasionally funny stuff. Archives
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