This Saturday, October 19th, we participated in the first competition of the OCCRA season. The competition went very well, as we left with a second place finish and the Quality Award!

The competition took place at our home school of Adams, and we were honored to host the event. We arrived at school at 7:00am to help set up field and concessions stand, which was run by team parents throughout the day. By the end of the day, after some students had joined us after taking the PSAT test, we had a total of about 90 students and parents there to cheer on the team.

This competition was our first glimpse of “Grid Lock” in action. While it was the first competition and we all were getting used to the game and the field, there was still some great competition.

We played a total of 4 matches, and won all four. However, in two of our matches we had technical difficulties and our robot did not start. The first time it was due to a field fault, and so the game was replayed successfully after they fixed the issue. The second time, it was because we forgot to turn the robot on! The other team, however, played awesomely and so we were still able to secure a win for the match.

Overall, the competition went very smoothly and with minimal delay. It lasted from around 10 until about 2:30, including cleanup, which is short for an OCCRA Saturday event, and so it was overall a very efficient event.

We were glad to see a lot of support from fans not on the team at the competition. Our Principal, Mr. Cumming, and Assistant Principal, Mr. May, both stayed to watch some matches, and Mr. Cumming said some opening remarks at the event. We were also very happy to see some students from our BASES classes attend to see what we do outside of the classroom and to experience the energy of robotics!

The photo video team took many photos throughout the competition and the scouting sub-team practiced for the FIRST season by scouting the matches. Everyone had some job to perform at the competition, whether it be scouting, cheering, taking photos, driving, working in the pit, setting up the field or working with the placebo robot.

The “placebo” robot is an extra robot which is usable by teams who have technical difficulties and cannot use their robot for the game. The team which ran the placebo bot in the competition was comprised of

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AdamBots, who worked hard all day to make sure that no team would be unable to compete due to technical problems.

We had a great start to the OCCRA season and are excited to participate in the rest of the competitions and outreach events of the season. The next competition is this Thursday at Waterford-Kettering High School.

Written by Cameron Johnson

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