Please tell us a bit about your experiences this year:
Who were the team members who went to worlds?
From Fairfield: Adeline Hahn, Luke Ostberg
From Simms: Mandy Widmer, Xander Digan, Marshall Kunkel, Halee Hane
From Vaughn: Carsten Brooks, Andrew Hanson
2. What were your roles?
Luke- Driver 1, Designer, Programmer, Builder, Captain
Xander- Driver 2, Designer, Builder, Programmer
Carsten- Drive Coach, Programmer, Builder, Designer
Adeline- Scouting, Engineering Notebook
Mandy- Building, Scouting
(The other three are our junior high team. At Worlds they helped with scouting and misc stuff)
3. Ended up second - how intense was the competition?
The competition was crazy. Without Super Regionals this year, we hadn’t faced teams of this caliber. We won Montana State with scores in the 300s, but at Worlds, there were a dozen or more 500+ scores. Teams had put in hundreds of hours testing every component of their robots, and it showed. They could single-handedly score over 300 points in a match while playing defense at the same time, scoring 40 minerals (blocks and wiffle balls) in the lander!
4. Tell me one thing (you can mention more if you want) that you will remember from this season or from worlds.
I’ll remember running through the CO2 cannons with my team and alliance (9829 MAKbots and 11260 Up-A-Creek) onto Minute Maid Field.
I’ll remember when the final score was posted for Jemison Division Finals 3; the live scoring showed that we’d lost by 30, so we were expecting to be eliminated, but penalties on Data Force caused us to win. The crowd went crazy, and all of us in the queuing area behind the field did too, jumping up and down, yelling, hugging and high-fiving as we realized we’d be playing on Minute Maid Field that night.
I’ll remember playing at Minute Maid with MAKbots and Up-A-Creek and how everyone asked us all the questions because we had been there before.
I’ll remember the opportunity we had first match of the competition to play with Data Force, a long time team friend. We put up some pretty high scores.
I’ll remember all of the awesome people I met in person that before, I had only talked with in person. I got to hear so many cool stories and learn all about their robots from them.
5. What was one thing you learned from worlds or the season that will stick with you?
The importance of teamwork- teams that didn’t get along didn’t play well. We worked through some teamwork issues this year, as did our friends from Utah teams, and by World’s, we’d resolved them, but they hadn’t, and it showed in team dynamics and how our robots did.
Consistency is key- After the last day of qualification rounds, we were ranked 13th because our robot had issues that caused us to lose 2 matches on the last day. Next year we will focus on making sure nothing bad can happen with the robot before competitions.