While my son was having his tonsils surgically removed, his FIRST Robotics team was busy competing at the Bayou Regional in Louisiana. My son was disappointed that he couldn't go, but health matters are a higher priority!
We used an app for iPhone to monitor the competition. On the final competition day on March 10, 2012, our family watched a live webcast of the competition via the Internet.
After seeding rounds, we were thrilled to see that his team was ranked 1st out of 49!
(Oh how my son wished he were there to see it all!)
Going into finals, our team, 1477 Texas Torque chose teams 624 CRyptonite from Katy, Texas and 4353 RoBoDawgs from Lafayette, Lousiana.
Their alliance took first place in the Regional!
Winning first place earns the teams a spot at World Championships in St. Louis in late April.
His team also won the Engineering Inspiration Award:
"The Engineering Inspiration Award celebrates a team’s outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers, both within their school and their community. Criteria include: the extent and inventiveness of the team’s efforts to recruit students to engineering, the extent and effectiveness of the team’s community outreach efforts, and the measurable success of those efforts. This is the second highest team award FIRST bestows."
The Engineering Inspiration Award has no formal submission nor presentation to the judges. The judges get their information from other teams, students and mentors, and robot performance."
-FIRST Wiki
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I mention the wins here, and it is cause for celebration, but really this competition is about the process. It's about the pre-planning, the six weeks of frantic designing and building. It's about a competition that is based not just on individual performance but also on cooperation with alliance teams.
Later, the coach said about the Bayou Regional, that every single thing went right and it almost seemed too easy. A lot of work went into that. The same could not be said of the next regional that they competed in. I'll share that story soon.
This competition is also about thinking on the fly, teamwork, problem-solving under stressful conditions and keeping a calm head and a good attitude of good sportsmanship in a crisis.
I am grateful that FIRST is a community event and that my son as a homeschooler, is allowed to join this team and intermingle with kids from four different public schools and a science magnet school.
