OCCRA Competition at Clawson and FIRST All-Girls Competition Recap

It’s been a very busy week for the AdamBots. As well as the regular week of build and team meetings, we’ve also been to two competitions- an OCCRA tournament at Clawson High School on Thursday and an off-season All-Girls Event at Bloomfield Hills High School on Saturday.

As always, we had multiple team meetings this week, in which we got a lot of work done.

This week, the Build Team made a few improvements on the robot and spent a great deal of time practicing three-point shots. First, we added a new air tank to the hanging system so that is fully functional. We also added two support pieces of aluminum on the front of the robot. Also, to prepare for our all-girls FIRST competition on Saturday, we trained our all-female drive team and pit crew.

In the Build Workshop, we finished disassembling the control panel of one of our old FIRST robots.

The Programming Team developed code for the chassis-study team to allow them to collect force and battery measurements and drive the chassis-simulation robot in predefined paths.

The Marketing Team continued its organized system. We distributed new jobs, as well as addressing old ones. Things are running very smoothly, and students each have tasks to be done to keep the team in order. Near the end of the meeting, we decided which posters and banners will go into the pit for Saturdays all-girl competition. Students volunteered to help get everything together for Saturday, after school Thursday and Friday.

The Digital Media Team decided to start updating the existing pages on the AdamBots website. We’re making designs for the front page of the website, which we are discussing next week. We also talked about the interview layout, what questions we’ll be asking the mentors, alumni, and students, and who will be interviewing them.

This week the Photo/Video Team continued to brainstorm ideas for their chairman’s video. They came up with a web of connections they could visualize in the video. They also worked on getting photos of the competition from Thursday onto the website.

On Thursday, November 14th we competed in the last Thursday competition for the 2013 OCCRA season. The competition was held at Clawson High School and was hosted by team 3302 from Clawson High School. We played in matches 6, 13, 20, and 23, scoring particularly well and we ended up having a tied score of 84 with team 2690 from Birmingham Seaholm and Groves High Schools. In the end, though, we won the tie-break against since we had won a match against them earlier in the day. By winning this match and two others we placed third overall in the competition. We had great fun at the competition and cannot wait for the OCCRA Championship next Saturday.

This Saturday, our girls (or EveBots) competed in an all-girls competition at Bloomfield Hills High School. It was an off-season FIRST event, where 24 teams, all from Michigan except one from Indiana and one from Canada, competed in last year’s game, Ultimate Ascent, most for the last time. By the end of the qualification rounds, we had won 7 games and lost 1, putting us in 2nd seed for alliance selection. We ended up as the captains of the 2nd alliance with teams 469 and 2604. After sweeping the quarter finals and semi-finals in the elimination rounds, we also won both of our final two games, defeating teams 3641, 33, and 51 to win the first place trophy! Our drive team and pit crew was all-girl, most of whom were working with the robot in competition for the first time, and they proved that they, too, can play some awesome robotics games!

Stay tuned for more AdamBots updates.   Written by Cameron Johnson