Civitas Robotics Team Rocks Their First Tournament

It is Tourney time, and we have just finished our first competition. We were one of 12 teams from across the state of Maryland, and met at Digital Harbor High early in the morning. We competed against a few city teams, but mostly private and charter schools from around the state.

Daquan West and Melvin Chisolm, two of my crack programmers showed up, and diligently began to test and re-program their robot. Many things were fixed, taken apart, broken, fixed and re-programmed. We ate some
nachos. More programming, more fixing, and Melvin had more nachos.

Daquans' Mother and sister showed up for moral support, and cheered us on.

The team was judged in 4 main areas, there was a research project, with a 5 minute presentation (we chose how robots help train Doctors to be better Doctors). This is set up much like Project Citizen for those of you who are familiar with that, non-robotic challenge. We then went again to be judged on the design and effectiveness of our robot. It was a grueling time. I was not in the room, just Daquan, Melvin, a robot, and some engineers asking them incredibly detailed and technical questions. I think I heard Daquan actually describing the way a Flux-Capacitor worked to a judge as I left the room.

After that was done, Melvin had some more Nachos, and they got back to tweaking and testing their robots. We sent a lot of time looking around and watching the other teams (all who were much more experienced then us btw) and I was nervous. All the other teams had these really big, technical looking robots with lots of bendy and foldy parts, and ours looked pretty simple next to them.

Finally, the contest got going, and one of the teams from Rockville, started with am amazing run, we watched that and Melvin with a mouth full of nachos said, "hey B, it' going to be a long day". I was like, "uh, yeah, and then I was like........nevermind, you get the point...... It was now our turn, Daquan put the robot on the table, selected the correct program, and pushed start, our robot season has officially begun.

The robot moved across the table slowly, and gracefully, almost elegantly, and then it smashed one of the game pieces and flipped over.....I am surprised it did not actually catch on fire....

At the end of the first round, we were able to recover and get a few points, but it was back to the drawing table.

We re-grouped, and the second round was much, much better, and after that, we were actually in a surprising place, 3rd. That was great feat, 3rd place in our first tournament of our "rookie" season.

One final round to go. We talked about strategy, we discussed what worked and what didn't, Melvin ate nachos. As the "coach" I could not have been more proud of our team, they did not get down when things were not looking good, they were helpful. They worked together, better then I have ever seen 2 teenagers work together in my life, and I really mean that. They were polite. They were interviewed by the Sun papers (keep an eye out for the article). They were focused. They listened to each other- really. In short, they were amazing.

Finally, finally, it was our turn. The last team in the 3rd and final round, the highest score is kept, the other two thrown out, and were stuck pretty firmly in 3rd. We here happy, really happy. We met our goal of making the tournament. We met our other goal of not totally embarrassing ourselves. The round went great. The kids were able to correct some of the problems from the first two rounds, and after scores for the final round were tabulated. We were now in 2nd place.....

WOW!

Finally the awards were handed out. I did not know what to expect. We were in 2nd place, but that was only for the "robot portion" of the contest - only 25%. We were also judged on our project and presentation, our teamwork, and our design and build of the robot (all worth 25% each as well).

In the end, we took home 2 awards, the Robot Design Award, and the Robot Performance award. Unheard of.

Daquan and Melvin finished 2nd overall, and were the only team to take home 2 trophies. Double unheard-of....

2nd place, not bad for a bunch of rookies....

David Brelsford - Robotics Guru