Skip to main content

FTC Delaware Regional, Part 2

EDIT: You can see videos of our robot that Ken Johnson posted on the FTC blog, here.

Like I posted about earlier, the FTC Delaware Regional Tournament was held on Saturday. What an exciting event! It was held in conjunction with both the FLL and JFLL Delaware State Championship, so it was a pretty major event with lots of teams and spectators.

Speaking of FLL, I was realizing at the tournament that I've now seen FLL from three totally different perspectives: as a team competing in it, as a referee, and now as an outsider looking in. It was interesting to see how vastly different these perspectives are, and it's also something that's good to keep in mind when one is refereeing or competing.

2945 Power Surge had a lot of fun competing and watching other teams compete. Our robot performed way beyond our expectations; we won all 11 of our matches, and recieved the Winning Alliance Award (equivalent to FLL's 1st Place Robot Performance) with our alliance partners 3165 Twisted Bots 2 and 7 Techbrick, and the Inspire Award (equivalent to FLL's Champion's Award). Our highest score in a single match was 213, in which we scored all of our alliance's points; no other alliance got higher than 100 points, and we broke the highest known record, 166 points. The second place alliance was composed of 134 R.A.T.S., 404 Charter Impulse, and 395 RoboAuks... congratulations to them and all the winning teams!
Here's a few pictures of the event:

Some of the audience... there were many people there!

Working on the robot before the matches... we had to do a good bit of tweaking to make the robot work with the competition fields (which were somewhat different than our practice field).
The tournament supplied a nice LEGO "brickbox" (instead of a sandbox) for the little ones to play with when they got a little bored. :-)

#2945 Power Surge with our robot and trophies. From left to right: Kevin, Phyllis, Chase, myself, Isaac, Timothy, and Kathleen.

The tournament was a really fun experience for us, and we're looking forward to our next regional in NJ next Saturday.

As always, you can learn more about the team at our website: http://www.teampowersurge.org/.

-Jonathan

Popular posts from this blog

Celebrating 25 Years of MINDSTORMS

In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS, we take a trip through history. Please also visit ROBOTMAK3RS Community every week as we highlight different projects all through 2023 in celebration of the anniversary. Some of the early history is based on the content shared by  Coder Shah  in our  MINDSTORMS EV3 Community Group . Some of the text and links may have been edited from his original posts for consistency and clarity.  1984 - Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen watched a TV program called "Talking Turtle," where MIT professor Seymour Papert demonstrated how children could control robot "turtles" using LOGO, a programming language he developed. 1988 - The collaboration between MIT and LEGO resulted in LEGO TC Logo in 1988, which allowed students to control LEGO models using computer commands. The video shows Papert demonstrating TC Logo. 1990 - LEGO TC Logo was hampered since the robots you built had to be tethered to a personal computer. LEGO and MIT...

ROBOTMAK3RS Review: LEGO River Steamboat

I thought the LEGO River Steamboat would be an interesting set for a ROBOTMAK3R review for a few reasons. First, the LEGO designer of the model is Marina Stampoli, a long-time collaborator of the late ROBOTMAK3R Vassilis Chryssanthakopoulo s. From earlier collaborations with Vassilis, I  knew Marina was incredibly talented, with an eye for aesthetics and functionality. Her background in architecture is particularly useful for her relatively new position at LEGO. Her other sets include the Magic of Disney (21352), Message Board (41839), and Red London Telephone Box (21347). Second, watching Marina's reveal video  and reading her designer interview made this set even more tempting to build. The gearing mechanisms running through the model gave way to many opportunities for automation using LEGO robotics elements. Since ROBOTMAK3RS is all about adding interactivity and automation to LEGO brick, I thought it would be fun to see where and how LEGO robotics could be added to this s...

Celebrating MINDSTORMS with a Remix - Part 3

The ROBOTMAK3RS continued their celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS through these Fall and Winter remix projects. Each ROBOTMAK3R was tasked with selecting one LEGO set of their choice and combining it with a MINDSTORMS set. Below are the five amazing models they came up with. Braill3 by Jerry Nicholls Braill3 is an EV3-based LEGO Braille bricks reader. This robot uses its fingertip, made from three touch switches, to read messages written using the LEGO Braille bricks and will speak out what it detected. If it sees a simple maths problem it will attempt to solve it and give the answer as well. To learn more about the process of creating this machine, read Jerry's blog . Braill3 can be viewed here . Set Review: The Braille Bricks set is well thought out. The ratios of the letters is suitable for general use and the addition of some punctuation and arithmetic operators is excellent. There is a card showing what bricks there are and their quantities, but no form of sort...