ORF Goes to World Championships 2023!

We have wonderful news to share with the Community!! This season ORF won the Engineering Inspiration Award at both District and District Championship events. This comes with an invitation to compete in the World Championships with our robot and for the world-level Engineering Inspiration award.

These awards showcase ORF’s impact on our community and internationally. This award also recognizes our raising First Core Values in underrepresented communities. These awards are based on our local outreach to other robotics teams, local business, and state legislatures about the values of our team, mentoring FLL teams, and hosting STEM community events. We also had international outreach in Cairo Egypt where we hosted a STEM workshop.

The championship will be in Houston at the George Brown Convention Center that seats 60,000 people. Our plan is to take 38 students and 6 mentor/chaperones to Houston on April 19, 2023. The team will meet with thousands of spectators and other teams from around the World. This will be an incredible experience that will be remembered for a lifetime!

GO ORF!!!

ORF runs ‘Cairobotics’ in Egypt

Olympia Robotics Federation Inspires Egyptian Students

On August 19, 2022, on a partially-cloudy afternoon in Seattle, ORF-4450 boarded their first flight en route to Cairo, Egypt. There would be no clouds under a sweltering late-summer Egyptian sun. Their flight landed late on Sunday night, and the jet-lagged and tired students of the Olympia Robotics Federation woke up at 6 am the next morning to begin Camp Cairobotics.

The story of this trip begins over the summer of 2021, when Brenda Diettrich, the Lead Mentor of the Olympia Robotics Federation, traveled on vacation to Egypt. Over the course of her voyage, she became very close with her tour guide, Samar. Samar’s son wanted to pursue robotics, so his mother’s friendship with Brenda was quite the stroke of luck. Using an Amazon grant, ORF established an FLL (Lego-based robotics) team in Egypt which he (and other Egyptian children) joined in order to kick off a future in robotics. This team, called Egy Robo, was mentored over Zoom by ORF. But after a successful season of competition, they wanted more.  The next level of robotics would be FTC (metal robotics, each robot approximately the size of a microwave), but no such thing existed in Egypt. With no predecessor team, they would have no materials nor experience to start an FTC program. They needed a robotics team with knowledge who could come to Egypt and teach them robotics, along with the core values of FIRST. And thus, the concept of Cairobotics was born.

ORF team members and parents had to raise $65,000 in three months to travel to Egypt with 17 students, 3 mentors, and 5 parent chaperones. This included the cost of supplying five Rev Robotics kits and a playing field. This was accomplished through several events, including crowdfunding (Mighty Cause), an online auction, a student-run food booth at Lake Fair, and a campaign to alert friends and family in the community to this opportunity.

Admittedly, Camp “Cairo” bots was not in Cairo, but in New Cairo, where the 17 American student -” teachers”, along with their entourage of adults, would teach 20+ Egyptian students in a small (originally residential) apartment. The “camp” was officially a part of Nutty Scientist, a small STEM academy in Cairo, partnered with the international math-and-science-based group Stemzone. ORF had spent the three months preceding the trip not only fundraising but also creating presentations and activities for their students. It became apparent mere hours before Cairobotics kicked off that much of their hard work was not suited for the conditions of the camp’s small space. Yet, ORF demonstrated great improvisation and flexibility on that first day, creating a great starting experience for their students. And after the first day of camp, the ORF students went back to their hotel to work on revamping the robotics lessons and the Nutty Scientists students of Cairobotics spread the word about the Robotics camp.

As the week progressed, increasing numbers of students joined camp Cairobotics (originally 10 students), largely fueled by their parents and other adults filming/live-streaming the camp and sharing it on social media. ORF Coach, Brenda, later learned that many of the Egyptian staff were shocked by the sight of high school students teaching younger students, a first experience for them. The camp space became more and more crowded day by day, and by the final day of camp, the number of students had more than doubled!

Egyption student proudly displays her groups robot

At the Cairobotics camp, the students were divided into teams and spent four and a half full days of camp building and programming their own FTC robot with the materials donated by ORF and its feeder FTC teams in Olympia. There were usually 2 ORF members and about 4 Cairobotics students per team.  On top of building their own robots, campers developed their own chants and mottos which they screamed and shouted during an absolutely riveting competition on the final day of the Cairobots camp. The teams competed in a tournament followed by an exciting championship match. The competition concluded with an awards ceremony. Fortuitously, every team won an award, and the day ended with a great celebration complete with pictures, cake, and of course, robots. That day ended with a teary goodbye and exchanging contact information, the American and Egyptian students parted ways with the satisfaction of completing an extraordinarily successful event. ORF students had given the Egyptian students the materials and know-how of robotics and friendships on another continent and the thirst for more knowledge which triggered the whispers for perhaps a second ORF expedition back to the nation…

Auburn Mountainview 2019 Recap

Auburn Mountainview was our first competition of 2019 with our new robot. Unfortunately, we started behind the eight ball with only 80% functionality due to losing four days of critical time during the snowstorm. We could pick up the cargo ball and place it, but not place hatch covers and no climb. 

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However, we got lucky in the first two matches with good partners, and each time our alliance won. So, we started in 4th place. With a little up and down, we were still in 7th at the end of the morning. Our drive team was doing very well but had to compensate for problems like a ball stuck in the middle of the intake lift (they twirled around and banged a wall to get it out). The afternoon was filled with highs and lows where the robot was down part of the time and had communication issues. We also made a few rookie errors in robot maintenance without a good checklist. So, we ended the day in 15th place with a 4-5 record.

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The next day we roared back and won the last three qualification matches and surprised the competition by consistently doing our nearly functional climb to level 2 on the habitat at the end of each match. This kicked us up to 7th place (out of 38) at the end of qualification rounds, where we became an alliance captain for the elimination rounds. This created a chance to pick up district ranking points toward the PNW District Championships. We were dogged by bad luck in the quarterfinals, with our partner robot getting stuck on a ball and rendered immobile in the first match and our robot dropping out for 30 seconds in the second match. These unfortunate events resulted in us getting knocked out in the quarterfinals, but we felt proud to have been an alliance captain for the quarterfinals. If we do the same or better in our next event with a 100% functional robot, we will play a significant role in the District Championships!

Bag & Tag 2019

FIRST robotics has this rule: all teams must stop building their competition robot 6 weeks after the kickoff. This was February 19th this year and at 9:00 pm we finished some final testing, and the robot was 90% operational when we put it in the bag with a special tag with a number on it that must be logged.

We have 6 hours of out of bag time to improve the robot and do more testing before our first competition, Auburn Mountainview this coming Saturday and Sunday, March 9th and 10th. Wish us luck!

FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff 2019

On the first Saturday of January, the 5th. FIRST puts on a worldwide live stream of a formal kickoff event for FRC. All the teams in the world watch this at the same time. This includes an introduction by the founders of FIRST, Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers, then an overview of the game and a detailed description of the field and rules. This year our partner, St. Martins University, and our team hosted the event for the third year in a row! We had teams from Tacoma, Chehalis, Shelton, Adna, Centralia, and Central Kitsap. The game’s theme was Destination: Deep Space. It involves robots traveling around Planet Primus, loading cargo and rocket ships, and climbing a habitat. This fits perfectly with our star trek theme, and we are taking the opportunity to go for the imagery award!

To see the game animation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mew6G_og-PI

FTC 2019 Regional Competition

While ORF has been involved with hosting FIRST Tech Challenge competitions for years, we took on the task of hosting and assisting in running the Regional Competition in partnership with Saint Martin’s University for the first time.

Members of the team served as queuers, field reset crew, and referees. In addition to our current team members being actively involved with running the event, Team Alumni Ryn, Anakin, Mika, and Mark returned to assist in running Pit Administration tasks and judging teams, and refereeing matches.

The team rose to the challenge. We’re excited to potentially run this event next year!

Sponsor Connections: DTI & H2O Jet

The marketing team from ORF created a presentation for two of our most important sponsors, Diamond Technology Innovations and H2O Jet, in order to ask for this year’s sponsorship. Lead Mentor, Mr. Cook, said that these were some of the best presentations we ever made.

Our presentations were very successful! We had a very favorable reception from both of our sponsors. We had fun and they showed us some of their technology. H2O Jet showed us their five robot cutting arm and DTI described to us the metal cutting process via diamond nozzles.

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Team Members with Diamond Technology Innovations

Team Members with H2O Jet’s Robotic Arm

Poinsettia Sale Fundraiser!

It’s that time of year again!

Are you in the Thurston County area and want to support your local robotics team? Get in the holiday spirit and buy a poinsettia!

Poinsettia Options:

Please email the following to orf4450@gmail.com to place your order

Sizes:

6’’ Pot ($12)

8 1/2’’ Pot ($24)

10’’ Pot ($36)

Colors:

Red

White

Pink

Delivery Date:

 12/4/2018
12/11/2018

Contact Information:

First & Last Name

Address

Phone Number

Email

Delivery Instructions (optional)

Give Local Campaign

You may have noticed a bright orange button on our website. From now until November 20th, we will be participating in The Community Foundation’s Give Local Campaign!

Give Local is The Community Foundation’s three-week online campaign to support non-profits in the South Puget Sound. Their goal is to help raise awareness and funds for these non-profit organizations in and outside of the community they originate from. The Community Foundation matches a percentage of however much we raise during the campaign to help support our cause.

Now, we need your help! All money that we raise from this fundraising campaign is used to help pay for hotels, transportation, competition fees, competitions, robot building materials, tools, and more!  If each person who follows us donates $5 (the price of your daily Starbucks coffee!), we would be able to reach our goal immediately!

If you cannot donate to our campaign at this time, please share the link to our campaign around to spread awareness!

https://givelocal.thecommunityfoundation.com/campaign/olympia-robotics-federation?design-mode=TILE

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”

— Kari W.

“I really liked being human player. It was fun running back and forth”

— Julie G.

“It was interesting to see other teams functioned differently from ours”

— Lily W.

“I liked manipulating. It was a good learning experience. It helped me work under pressure. People were also really nice and had great sportsmanship.”

— Briana L.

“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.”

— Vidushi S.

Girls Generation - 2018 — Olympia Robotics Federation (orf4450.org)

Peak Performance - 2018

On September 8th, we went to one of two of our annual off-season events - Peak Performance! It was quite the event, so there is a lot to unpack:

Connection Issues Galore!

Just like in the competition season, we had more than a couple of connection issues when out on the field. Our driver’s station failed to connect on multiple occasions, causing the event to be delayed, as the field technicians did their best to help solve the problem. We also had the issue of the router on our robot getting disconnected because of a hard collision against the wall, which left us disabled for the entire match. Thankfully, as the competition went on, the connection issues we seemed to have appeared less often.

Loss After Loss

Even though the team’s-connection issues were resolved, and our team performed very well (despite having rookie drivers), as well as climbing almost every match (even if it climbed in ways that it wasn’t built to), we still lost the majority of our matches. By the end of the qualifying rounds, we were in second to last place in the competition, 27th overall.

Alliance Selection & Finals

While our chances of being picked looked grim, our overall individual performance during qualification rounds made us very appealing to the first seed alliance captain Team 3663 - Cedar Park Robotics, and their first pick team 1983 - Skunkwork Robotics. Our team was very overjoyed that we were picked despite our low ranking.

With our alliance, we made it to the Finals. But it wasn’t without difficulty. We had to play with only two robots against some very tough alliances. Team 1983’s intake arm broke during one of the quarter-final matches, so they were out of commission for three matches to fix it. Luckily, we won two of those three matches to move on to the finals without them. These victories made our day.

In finals, we went up against our toughest alliance yet. With 1983 back in action when we needed them most, we had some very close matches. We went on into a tiebreaker round which resulted, in a narrow victory for the other alliance.

Summer Recap

Hello all,

It’s been a while, so here is a recap of our summer fun!

Live Long and Prosper Thank You Event

Our annual thank you event was a blast! There was a custom cake from Pheobe’s bakery specialty stands, student and mentor speakers, parents, sponsors, and volunteers. Throughout the evening signed poster boards for our sponsors’ spoke about the year, then enjoyed the delicious fiddles.

Nova Discoveries Camp

This summer, NOVA middle school held its annual discoveries camp where 4th and 5th graders can enroll in camps that can teach skills anywhere from board game design to geology. One of our team members helped mentor a robotics course. We taught the Amazon Girls Initiative camp and supplied them with a field. We plan on continuing to teach young people STEM skills to create a better future.

Lakefair

Every year, we run a crepe booth at Lakefair, Olympia’s annual festival. Our booth is often very popular, typically selling over 500 crepes. This year, though, we struggled to sell as many as we usually do. We managed to keep it going through adversity and help from the greater community.

1. Refrigerator problems

Due to difficult transportation, our refrigerator broke, meaning all of our ingredients were at room temperature. Our booth was briefly shut down for health code violations, but luckily none of this food was sold. Thankfully, a team alumnus was able to pull some strings at Lowe’s and loaned us a working fridge for the rest of the week. This allowed us to continue work at our booth.

2. Life outside of robotics

People have lives outside of ORF, and sometimes the schedules don’t line up. We run the booth for 13 hours five days a week, and we need at least 4 people at the booth at all times. We only have 20 people on the team, most of whom have job responsibilities and vacation plans during Lakefair. When it came down to it, we just didn’t have enough people available to run our booth. Team 4925 Alternating Current agreed to send some of their team members over to help run the booth during the week for a portion of the profits.

3. Mother Nature

In mid-July, even Washington gets hot. We had highs of 95 degrees Fahrenheit and hot griddles running all day in a stuffy tent. When it’s almost 100 degrees out very few people want food, much less hot food. We had very few people come mid-day to the fair this year on the weekend, most people opting to stay in air-conditioned or shadowy places. But, thanks to a stroke of genius by a team parent we were able to capitalize on the heat. Using strawberry juice from the process of making our strawberry mix and adding a little lemon-lime soda, the Summer Strawberry Sparkler was born. It proved to be a huge success.

Harbor Days

Harbor days this year ran on a skeleton crew, but thanks to our mentors, alumni parents, and team members we were able to man the booth all weekend. The event saw major technical difficulties with the robot, but even without the robot running for nearly two full days, we were still able to reach out to many in our community, and from all across the northwest as people from outside the state on visits came down to the pier. Special thanks to Larrissa for letting us use her work office to store the robot and other expensive equipment during the night, and all of the people on the team who gave up their weekend and Friday to man the booth.

That sums up our summer. Stay tuned for more regular updates, new blogs, and a fresh Captain’s Blog next week!

Live Long and Prosper,

Llewyn Merrill

Pacific Northwest District Championships

 Two weeks ago, ORF went to the Pacific Northwest District Championships to compete with 64 other teams from Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, to see who would go to the World Championships in Houston, Texas, from April 18th to the 20th. Only the top 28 ranking teams in the PNW district, plus teams that had won specific awards, would be invited to Houston. Although our drive team kept us in contention. We had bad luck and finished in 30th place in the district. We had hoped that two teams would decline their invitations. However, only one dropped out, and our competition season came to an end,

However, the experience did provide some great things for our team. Multiple students attended seminars on how to integrate engineering into community outreach and how to attract more girls to the STEM program and the Girls FIRST Initiative. Members of the team were able to meet with the president of FIRST Washington, Erin McCallum, to discuss our participation in helping run an all-girls day camp this May with Amazon. Other beneficial experiences from the event were Odyssey’s first climb and conversations pwith Autodesk employees and potential coworkers. We also formed new connections with other PNW teams, such as team 3218: Panther Bots, 2557: SOTAbots, 4915: Spartronics, 360: The Revolution, and others, whom we will be helping with recruitment. We will also be collaborating in scouting using ORF’s scouting app. Even though we will not be going to Houston, the team will stay busy with the summer camp, fostering new relationships with other FIRST teams and preparing for our celebration events. On May 10th, we hosted our Sponsor Thank You event. Later in the school year we had a team celebration. After the annual postseason discussion, the team is already starting next year’s Chairman’s Award, summer project ideas, and recruitment plans.

Despite coming up short, we competed with honor. The truth about FRC is that it doesn’t end with the competition season. FRC never ends, even after students leave the team for college. We will always be working towards a better future that will ensure our community and team continue to live long and prosper. I will leave the team with these words of encouragement; Houston 2019, here we come.

Two weeks ago, ORF went to the Pacific Northwest District Championships to compete with 64 other teams from Washington, Oregon, and Alaska, to see who would go to the World Championships in Houston, Texas, from April 18th to the 20th. Only the top 28 ranking teams in the PNW district, plus teams that had won specific awards, would be invited to Houston. Although our drive team kept us in contention. We had bad luck and finished in 30th place in the district. We had hoped that two teams would decline their invitations. However, only one dropped out, and our competition season came to an end,

However, the experience did provide some great things for our team. Multiple students attended seminars on how to integrate engineering into community outreach and how to attract more girls to the STEM program and the Girls FIRST Initiative. Members of the team were able to meet with the president of FIRST Washington, Erin McCallum, to discuss our participation in helping run an all-girls day camp this May with Amazon. Other beneficial experiences from the event were Odyssey’s first climb and conversations pwith Autodesk employees and potential coworkers. We also formed new connections with other PNW teams, such as team 3218: Panther Bots, 2557: SOTAbots, 4915: Spartronics, 360: The Revolution, and others, whom we will be helping with recruitment. We will also be collaborating in scouting using ORF’s scouting app. Even though we will not be going to Houston, the team will stay busy with the summer camp, fostering new relationships with other FIRST teams and preparing for our celebration events. On May 10th, we hosted our Sponsor Thank You event. Later in the school year we had a team celebration. After the annual postseason discussion, the team is already starting next year’s Chairman’s Award, summer project ideas, and recruitment plans.

Despite coming up short, we competed with honor. The truth about FRC is that it doesn’t end with the competition season. FRC never ends, even after students leave the team for college. We will always be working towards a better future that will ensure our community and team continue to live long and prosper. I will leave the team with these words of encouragement; Houston 2019, here we come.

Glacier Peak Competition: Comeback Bot

Two weeks ago, ORF went to the Glacier Peak event in Snohomish. We had expected the competition to be less competitive than other district events, even though we chose it because of the spacing we wanted between the first and second competitions. However, when we arrived we knew it would not be an easy competition. Teams like Shockwave, Skunkworks, CyberKnights, and the winner of our last competition Jack in the Bot, were all there.

We started the day with 4 match losses in a row. We were in 35th place out of 36, and if we didn’t get some match wins, lack of ranking points might have meant that we didn’t make it to the PNW Championship for the first time in the team’s history. The six scouts in the stands were saddened by the losses and tired after working with the bare minimum amount of scouts. There were no scheduled breaks, and teachers and two members from team 3070 Pronto had to be recruited at Rome’s when Chairman’s award or emergencies in the pit arose.

But then our luck changed. After the build team removed some untested systems hindering the bot, we had our first win of the day and shot up to 22nd place. After lunch, we earned four ranking points from a match where our autonomous succeeded. Our alliance won the match due to a clumsy error on the opposing alliance, giving us a free climb that combined with a levitate Power Up. Our alliance “defeated the boss” and achieved our fourth ranking point, bringing us to 14th place. By the end of day two, we had made it to 12th place.

Had we been a 3rd pick by a 3rd or 4th seed alliance, we would have had a chance to make it to the finals again. Fate had other plans. As the top 8 picked the other top 8 teams, we became the 8th seed alliance, captain. We did gain more ranking points, but we would have gotten more had we gone to the semifinals. As 8th seed, our picks were good but not as strong as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd seed alliances. We lost two matches to the 1st seed alliance and never made it to the semifinals.

Overall the competition was not as successful as we had hoped. Considering the challenges we faced, it was impressive nonetheless. As Co-Captain Peter Barette said, “It wasn’t as successful as Mt.Vernon for our team, but it was more successful for us as a team.”

We are headed to PNW Districts next Wednesday, so expect a blog update on Thursday and Sunday.

Live long and prosper.

Captain's Blog: Mt. Vernon Competition

There are few things like a FRC Robotics competition. The impressive game field, packed seating, hundreds of participants, decked out pits, and most importantly, robots, can be awe inspiring.

This past weekend ORF traveled to Mt.Vernon High School for our first competition of the season, where we made team history by winning the Entrepreneurship Award and making it to Finals for the first time! The drive team of Peter Barrette, Alina Chandra, Anakin Duncan-Kimble, Colin Eastabrook and Sean Flo performed phenomenally, doing what no other drive team on the team has been able to do with the help of team 4915 Spartronics and team 4215 Bear Bots.

ORF would like to credit our head of the Business Team, Lily Winters, for winning the Entrepreneurship award. According to FIRST, “This award celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit and recognizes a team which has developed a comprehensive business plan in order to define, manage and achieve the team’s objectives. This team displays entrepreneurial enthusiasm and the vital business skills to ensure a self-sustaining program.” Ms. Winters has been working on this project for the entire season and her work shows.

On Friday, March 2nd the advanced team left for Mt.Vernon at approximately 1:30pm, sacrificing school time and their Friday evening for the team. The next day the rest of the travel team came to P9 for a 6:30am departure. This is where the troubles started. The OSD van that was supposed to transport some of the team was locked up at OSD headquarters until eight o’clock. Thankfully there were enough parent volunteers, and our new mentor Andy Tran drove his car up, and everyone made it on time. Upon arriving at Mt. Vernon High School, the team was greeted with the words, “We’re sorry to hear about your robot. Is it going to be okay?” from other teams.

The robot was being unresponsive to controls from the driver station. The robot had essentially become a 120 lb paperweight. The issue lied not with the robot, but with the driver station. For some reason the driver station was not registering an ethernet cable connection. In addition to our myriad of problems, our drive team was not given much time to practice driving the robot. Thanks to a fabulous FTA, we were able to revive our robot and our first match ended with a win! Things weren’t looking to bad when the build team tested the climbing apparatus, which then broke. The drive team switched strategies with amazing results. Using our autonomous program to place a power cube into our alliance’s switch we were able to guarantee at least 1 RP per match, provided the other robots on our alliance could move forward in auto. By the end of day one we were ranked 8th, in position to be alliance captains. Then, due to a mistake while uploading the data, all of the scouting data for the day was deleted. Luckily, Team 4915 had agreed to share their scouting data with us, and thus another bullet was dodged. By the end of day two ORF was also ranked 8th and became the captain of the 5th seed alliance. We made it all the way to the finals where we lost to the 3rd seed alliance led by team 2910 Jack in the Bot (who will be at the Glacier Peak district event. Rematch!).

After the awards ceremony, the team was happy and exhausted. We had the strongest event of the team’s history because of the hard work and dedication of the team for the past two months. “As I was going past the judges, I heard one of them say, ‘I don’t know how they did it.’” recounted mentor Brenda Diettrich. “I know exactly how we did it. We made it to finals this weekend because we persevered.” Or as mentor Richard Corn said, “We dug deep.”

The semifinals curse has finally ended, portending a new era for team 4450. If the first competition is any indication this should continue to be an excellent season.

Live long and prosper!

Captain's Blog: The Vandalism of Our Workspace

Captain’s Blog Stardate 95721.3

Over the last week, The Olympia Robotics Federation experienced several break-ins and vandalism.

Wednesday morning, the water jugs left outside of our robotics portable were found smashed in the morning. Thursday night, we found one of the windows smashed and the portable broken into. Thankfully, nothing of value was taken or destroyed. We were only missing a fire extinguisher which was sprayed around our workspace. The back door was propped open and it was assumed that the vandals were interrupted mid-break-in and planned to return.

On Saturday night, the vandals did return. Unfortunately, they did much more damage than on Thursday night. They tore down the board that covered the broken window and shattered the adjacent window. Many of our awards on display were broken, and pieces were scattered around the room. One of our wall-mounted monitors was torn off the wall and smashed. Two of our desktop monitors were also hit. Our equipment and supplies were taken off the tables and scattered over the floor. Last year’s robot, Enterprise, was shoved to the ground. Thankfully this year’s robot suffered minimal damages after the table it was being built on, and many others were flipped over.

We do not condone any vandalism, and we hope these perpetrators are caught soon. We’ve dealt with adversity in the past, and while not to this extent, we always persevere. We are a resilient team, and we will continue moving forward.

Thank you and as always,

Live Long and Prosper

Captain's log: The Next Generation

Captain's log Stardate 95677.8

Hello all,

For those seeing this as your first Captain's log, welcome! This "Next Generation" will consist of weekly blog updates by a team member. For example, on March 4th’ there will be a blog about the competition and our matches. The week there might be two blogs, one about our fundraising efforts (tips and strategies, for example) and the other about Bag and Tag.                                         

Thank you for visiting our webpage, and stay tuned for articles every Sunday!

JOKE OF THE WEEK

Never trust an atom

they make up everything!