Competition day - Regional win

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Competition Day


Yesterday eight of us went to the FFL regional competition in The American School In London, there were many teams, half of them from that very school. Our first match at 9:55 went horribly wrong as we had some wrong information that we could touch the bot in the placing area as we thought it was a also part of base. Through this we lost 60 points putting us in 6th place. Immediately after the first match we had our core values presentation, in which we were split in two, one part had to make an animal while the other a habitat for that animal. The two teams were allowed to communicate but cold not see what the other was making. This in its core idea was a team building exercise. At 10:55 we had our second match in which we improved our score by 25 putting us in 4th place. Next we had our robot design segment in which we had to present our bot and why we had made it as we did, the two judges drilled us looking at the functionality of our code and efficiency of our attachments. Things looked dire as we came up to our non-scoring match at 12:25 but Sida and Rishabh quickly changed tactics for the better, in this match we scored a high of 215 points. Filled with confidence the team walked into the project presentation, by the judges' reactions we could tell we had done well. Even they said that they could talk about ParkingBot for another hour. Then came our last match in which we scored 265 points putting us in 2nd place, the tactic switch in the Filler match had payed off again.

With Black Thunder coming in the top four teams we were allowed to battle in the unofficial semi-finals, in which we got our personal best score of 290 points, we could have breached 300 if the bot was able to do the traffic jam first try. After winning the semis we battles in the finals where everything went wrong, the whole team was shaking under pressure and that got the better of us but we still won with 250 points. So it was a very successful day.
Location: Reading School, Erleigh Rd, Reading RG1 5LW, UK

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