This weekend I went with the LHS Robotics team (comprised of three teachers from LHS, a dozen or so students, and five Digi Key employees) to the Lake Superior Regional Competition in Duluth. Thursday was practice and fine tuning our bot. Friday and part of Saturday was qualifying rounds.
How the rounds work is that six robots square off in two different alliances. There is a blue alliance (comprised of three robots) and a red alliance (again, comprised of three robots). Together each alliance has three different objects.
First, there is the autonomous round. Here the bot is programmed to accomplish a task on its own. In this competition, we had to shoot pre-loaded frisbees through a goal.
Second, is the loading round. Here one student can control the robot and guide it across the course (where other robots can try and slow it down or block it) to where another student is waiting by a shoot and then drops up to four frisbees into the robots loader mechanism. Then the student pilots the robot back to the other end to try and score as many frisbees in the goal as possible. Time permitting, the student can try to load one or two more times before the final phase begins.
The final phase is the climbing phase. At either end of the course are two towers (one for each alliance). To earn points, robots can climb up three different rungs on the tower. Our bot was designed to pull itself just off the ground (the judge passed a piece of paper under the wheels to determine that it was, in fact, off the ground). This results in ten points. If you can climb to the second rung, you earn 20 points. If you can climb all the way to the top, you can earn 30 points.
From all the qualifying rounds, on Friday and the first part of Saturday, the top 8 teams are selected (we ended up 12th overall).
Then there is a big selection process where teams can select alliances of three teams. For example, the #1 ranked team can ask any team (ranked or not) to join them. Then the team asked to join can either accept (and most do) or refuse (and one did). So the top ranked team might select the second ranked team to join them. That means now that there are only 6 remaining teams. As a result, the teams that used to be ranked #9 and #10 now move in to the top 8.
As the selection process began, we were passed over again and again. Until finally the last team asked us to join them in an alliance. We accepted. Then we had the first chance at picking another team to complete our three team alliance.
When this was all completed, we had a few minutes to get our bot ready and then it was announced we'd be squaring off against the #1 ranked team in a best of 3 competition.
Our alliance swept them. Then we swept our next opponents which put us in the championship against the #7 ranked alliance.
In the championship match, we defeated the other alliance in the first match. However, in that win, our bot's climbing device broke down. So in the second match we weren't able to climb, losing out on 10 points. We were never able to fix the climbing mechanism properly as it failed in the final match, costing us the chance at the championship.
Despite not winning the championship, our kids were quite proud of themselves and all the work they completed.
What amazed me about this whole process was a comment Coach McGlynn made on the first day when we entered the pits (which was basically an auditorium full of stations for each school and their bot). Teams could freely walk around and ask questions and comment on any of the bots.
Matt said, "I'll walk around here and think I wish we would have thought of that! Or think that's so cool. I can't wait to try that on our bot next year."
I love that aspect of learning and sharing of information and inspiration.
I couldn't help but wish that we had such an experience in education.
But, alas, we never get the chance to observe other classrooms or teachers in action and think I wish I would have thought of that!
How awesome would it be if - as part of our staff development time - the different departments could actually travel to different schools and see how they actually go about teaching their classes?
Think of how awesome that would be for improving our craft. Just like we do in robotics.
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