After last year’s close call to states, the Full Metal Jackets are ready to get back at it again. In January, when the game dropped students immediately went to work on designing, building, and coding the robot. This year’s challenge was REEFSCAPE. In short, the game consists of hanging from the barge, taking off algae, and putting coral on the Reef Scape. Over the weekend, the team faced numerous adversities but never gave up. Mr. Simmons, the coach, shares what he hopes students will take away from the first competition of their season: “Students see their ideas come to life, that they are actually able to implement their ideas to the robot.”
On Friday, March 14, the robotics team went to Columbia Central High School to set up their workstation. They also had their robot ready to go first thing in the morning, so they would not start the day off with setbacks. After setting up the station, students were allowed to go around to all of the other teams. While they went around to the other teams, they learned about who they were, and what they did, and collected the pins left out for people. Senior Alex Searles feels that time in between is just as important as the matches because it can bring teams together. He shares, “I took some time to draw another team’s robot and gave them the drawing. About thirty minutes later, they ended up giving us a small plastic egg with their team logo and number printed on it. This brought our teams together.”
At the beginning of March 15, the team started the day off great. They did well with their interviews, communicating effectively with alliances, and the robot had hardly any problems. During one of their matches, the robot’s wiring made the robot stop working in the middle of the field. Many were emotionally down about the robot breaking, but after three matches and tons of help from many different teams, their spirits rose when the robot started working. Even after the long day, Searles was grateful for all the help that they received: “I would like to thank them. The teams who helped us were amazing. They were helpful and kind, and I hope we can compete with or against them again.”
Ending the troubling day on a high note, sophomore Dakota Miller is a builder on the team and has helped with any problems that were brought up throughout the day. Miller shares how she felt about the day overall: “I think we did okay. If the robot didn’t malfunction then we would have done a lot better, but we experience a lot of technical problems, especially wiring.”
After the robot issues were fixed, students came bright-eyed and happy to get back into the competition on March 16. They worked hard to finish out strong. During their second-to-last match, junior Brayden Grindall played amazing defense on the field, so much so that the main referee said that was the “best defense he had ever seen”. Not only that but, freshman Zane Jason had the chance to play as a human player and ended up scoring a shot for the team. As it was his first time ever doing robotics, he felt, “It wasn’t too bad. I got to work on the robot, and… it will help me in my engineering career.”
After a long weekend of fun and hardship, the students were ready to fix problems immediately for the next competition. They plan on changing the base plate, and the elevator, cleaning up the wiring, and changing the in and outtake. Captain of the coding team, junior Maddox Hutchinson explains how they are preparing for the next competition: “Everybody is helping… assigning people positions and telling them that we can’t move on till they are crossed off our list.”
The next competition will be held at Churchill High School in Livonia from March 27th through the 29th. Concord wishes the team good luck for the next competition and hopes that they do not run into any more problems, especially during a match.
