Girls Generation - 2018
This October, rookie girls trained to become expert robot manipulators for Girls Generation. Their hard work and dedication showed at this competition! Although, Girl’s Generation, our second off-season competition, didn’t go off completely without a hitch
Problems in the Morning
More than a few issues took place the morning of the competition that almost prevented us from not being able to compete! First and foremost, we had nobody to drive our robot/tool trailer to the competition! Not only that, but the Olympia School District gave us a van to transport students that were two seats short! Thankfully through some quick thinking and help from two team Alumni, we managed to make it to the competition on time.
The Competition
While our robot driver for the competition stayed the same each match, all 6 of our girls swapped off manipulator, coach, and human player positions. Thanks to their extensive training, there was no major human error when performing their tasks. They also performed near-perfectly in situations where they had to do things mid-match that they didn’t get any practice doing beforehand (ex: going to the other side of the field, putting cubes in the opposing switch, etc).
On top of the drive team performing well in the competition, we had another small victory; no more connection issues! If you followed us during the competition season, you would know that we held up every single one of our matches due to having connection issues. We also had the same problem at our last off-season event; Peak Performance. After that event, replaced our driver’s station laptop, so we can only assume that is what fixed the connection issues
In terms of where we ranked at the end of qualification rounds, we ranked relatively low (25th out of 37 teams) due to a few narrow losses. However, even though we were ranked low, our performance showed in the other rankings. We ranked first in terms of the most vault points scored, and tied for second in terms of the most climbing points. Because of our high ranking in our niches, (filling up the vault, and climbing consistently and quickly) first seed alliance captain Team 4512 - BEAR Bots, and their first pick Team 2910 - Jack in the Bot selected us to be their second pick.
Unfortunately, unlike Peak Performance, we didn’t make it to finals. In our first semi-final match, BEAR Bots broke down, leaving only two robots on the field. With World Championship Winning Team 2976 - Spartabots on the opposing alliance neutralizing our switch, and high-ranking team 2046 - Bear Metal completely dominating the scale, we knew that the match had already been lost.
In our second semi-final match, we changed our strategy to better defend against the opposing alliance. Unfortunately, this time, our robot was the one to break. First, our intake mechanism broke when trying to manipulate cubes from the pyramid to the vault. Then, when attempting to place a cube in our switch, our entire lift mechanism broke, causing us to quickly change our strategy to play physical defense on Team 2976 since we could no longer manipulate cubes. While playing defense on 2976, they rammed us into the wall hard enough to completely disable our robot for the rest of the match. That match was sufficiently lost. The alliance that we lost ended up winning the entire event.
The Girl’s Thoughts
Overall, all of the girls who went had a good time. These are some of their testimonials.
“It was cool, I met a lot of amazing people”
“I really liked being human player. It was fun running back and forth”
“It was interesting to see other teams functioned differently from ours”
“I liked manipulating. It was a good learning experience. It helped me work under pressure. People were also really nice and had great sportsmanship.”
“I loved the experience of Girls Gen. It was great seeing more female representation in the STEM world, and I love the idea that these types of events can carry over in the real world and make a difference in STEM fields globally.”
