Fembot's Practice Day

By Sarra Hilali

My Gosh, we have been busy! Yesterday our robot was shipped, and I am sure that was one of the happiest days of my life. I haven’t had time to update because we have been so busy building.

So I will take this opportunity to fill you in on what has happened the past two weeks: In the past years we have never taken the time to paint our robot. We’ve gone to competition after competition with an aluminum colored robot. There’s nothing wrong with that but honestly it dosen’t look as snazzy as the painted ones do. This year we have decided that only waiting for a day to get the robot very awesomely colored is worth it.

We have also decided that this year we should have a practice robot. In other words we’ll be building a robot that is identical to the original so we’ll have a robot to practice perfecting our strategy and other skills.

This Valentine’s Day we went to visit another All-girls team, the Fembots of Saint Francis High School in Sacramento. They were hosting a practice day where we had the opportunity to practice with 17 other teams before we ship our robot. I believe that this is a huge improvement to before where we were last year. But the 12th,, which was a Thursday we were supposed to work on the robot, which was still not put together to prepare for the practice day.

But to our great misfortune the parts that were greatly anticipated did not arrive…ahhhh! So we had no choice to stay all day Friday and Saturday morning working on the robot, when we were supposed to leave San Jose at 5:30 a.m. to arrive at the practice match on time. Several of us stayed until about 1:00 am and some did not go home and left the lab to go to the practice match. Talk about dedication.

The Practice day was AMAZING. We actually got our robot to drive and SCORE POINTS. Unfortunately we do not have video footage of this joyous occasion but we will when we go to the Silicon Valley Regional, (SVR) Competition. Our awesome human player, Isabelle did some amazing feats in the last round. It was a phenomenal event! But what was really cool at the practice event was that we were able to get the chance to see how other teams’ robots looked and how they worked.  I can say that for all the robots we saw had polycarb lining and some type of conveyor system.

Now the rest of the two weeks before SVR will be spent on strategy, the bill of materials, the Chairman’s Award and other details.