Category: Competition!

Greetings from Norman, Oklahoma! The team arrived at the hotel this evening and the excitement is certainly building!! We reconstructed our robots, ate some pizza, and enjoyed a chill evening. We will start our day bright and early tomorrow at 7 am so that we can start practice as soon as possible- can’t wait to get on the boards! I will continue post updates here throughout the week so stay tuned!

We are less than a week away from flying to Norman, Oklahoma for GCER! After taking yesterday off for the 4th of July ~hope you all had a great holiday!~ we are pushing through the rest of this week to get our robots polished and competition ready.

As we do this, we must also begin planning to pack our robots; they must be disassemble for traveling on an airplane. On top of this, we have to prepare our laptops, hardware supplies, batteries, chargers, and more! A busy week in the cave but we are all thrilled to be heading back to GCER after two years pause.

Regionals was a great success for DRS! We came in 1st overall, winning both the seeding and double elimination rounds, and were selected as Judge’s Choice! Although we did very well and are extremely proud of our students, our robots struggled! We never achieved our maximum score and neither robot preformed at its best.

Looking forward to GCER, we will improve our robots’ designs to better account for any board design variables and adjust our routine as scoring guidelines change. Thanks for keeping up with us!

Score: 86

Yeah, we had a few issues. Our create bot’s arm decided it wouldn’t actually reach above the platform and instead it would get caught. This caused create to completely malfunction to give us a total of zero points. However our lego bot didn’t fail us and it gave us 86 points all by itself. Way to go lego bot. Apparently, Mary didn’t give enough love to create. She’ll have to try harder next time. Our average was 148, however only the two highest scores from the seeding rounds are actually put into the average that decides seeding, and that number was 179. This brought us to finish seeding in fourth place. Not too shabby, all things considered. Hopefully we’ll fix up any glitches and be ready for head-to-head by the time it rolls around. I haven’t the slightest clue as to whom we’ll be playing against tomorrow, but I’ll keep you guys informed. Keep a look out for a blog about the things we do when we’re not playing with robots because I think you’ll be rather entertained.

Score: 172

We could still do better, but we could also still do a lot worse. My fingers are crossed for scoring so high next round that we have to step on the hopes and dreams of other teams to get there. Not that I condone unsportsmanlike conduct. I intend to crush them in the most polite and respectful way. However the way things are going, I doubt we’ll crush anyone. That’s okay though. We really just want to our robots to function properly and we’re quite sure that if they do so, we’ll do well. We’ve dropped from first to second I believe. There’s another round though and I’m confident we will be able to bring up our score. I think we’d all really love to get first place in seeding. I was really happy with our success at Regionals and everyone would be ecstatic if we were able to keep it up. We’re convinced that our robots do better when Mary personally wishes them good luck. You’ll be pleased to know Mary has promised to give them all the luck she can give before our next seeding round.