The Greenwood High School robotics team left with a first-place win at last weekend’s competition in Lafayette.
The Greenwood High School robotics team won the first place ‘Motivate’ award, placing highest out of the 25 other teams present.
“One thing the team did well during the competition was having enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a huge part of the competition and helps with focus on driving and doing well in the interview,” junior Jack Thompson said.
To prepare, the team practiced in both areas of the competition. They did a variety of exercises to prepare for both driving the robot and the interview portion.
“For the driving portion, we hold drivers tryouts and have timed runs to see who can score the most points in 2 minutes. Whoever wins gets to drive, and by winning, you then continue to just practice driving for about 30 minutes to an hour at each meeting. For interviews, we always prepare a rough draft of a script that has everything we want to talk about, then we ask our coaches to sit in, and we do practice runs of our interview while the coaches take notes and tell us what we can do better,” Thompson said.
The competition, located at Battle Ground Middle School, introduced new regulations. According to Junior Joe Rhynearson, these new rules became an obstacle to success.
“We had troubles with the sizing of our robot because they had new rules on the sizing of the extension of the robot,” Rhynearson said.
Despite the high school team’s issues with faulty technology before the competition, they found time to assist the Greenwood Middle School robotics team.
“We had a lot of issues in the design process but figured it out. The middle school team had some issues with motors burning up so we also helped them with that,” Rhynearson said.
During the competition, the team had to work together to overcome a myriad of issues that, if not fixed, could have cost them their first-place win.
“ Our slide was bent after every match, so we had to carefully bend it back to fix it so that we didn’t break our slide. Another problem was one of our servos broke and so we had to do a quick switch so that way we’d be able to score in our next match,” Thompson said.
The team recognizes that despite their impressive win, they still have much to improve on before the next competition.
“We had good communication between our own and as a team. There is still a lot we can improve on and also improve our Autonomous,” Rhynearson said.
The team not only walked away from the competition with a first-place win but also with knowledge of how to improve their performance in the future.
“Our team has learned from the competition better strategies for the robot game, and how we can make our robot more efficient and effective at scoring points. Another thing we learned is how to communicate with our partners during the competition better,” Thompson said.
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