Last night there were some issues regarding bedtime. While we had a 11 o’clock curfew by which we had to be inside a room and relatively quiet, there was no official time that we had to be sleeping. Granted, we wanted to get to practice rounds today as soon as they started at 7:30, meaning wake-up time was soon after 6. But after playing an epic game of mini golf, swinging on the best swingset ever that is located right next to our dorms, playing an intense card game of B.S., and eating lots of starbursts and sour patch kids, somehow sleep didn’t come easily. We dropped off gradually, with a kid going to bed every half hour once it was past 2:30, but there were still five of us who were up until 4:30.
When the alarm clock went off at 6:15, we had some difficulty waking up. Apparently, at 7:05 (when we were supposed to have left at 7), someone went in Liam’s room, told him the time, and he seemed to have been dreaming that we were still involved in the card game and yelled his disbelief at his awakener. Eventually, we all deliriously shuffled out of the dorms and into the cars.
We practiced our head-to-head code, and it ran pretty well. We then headed to the auditorium to listen to three presentations by scientific/engineering related speakers; I’m sure they were fascinating, but my brain definitely didn’t absorb much of it in its sleepwalking state. After the break for lunch, we listened to another speaker, and this one I was able to fully pay attention to since lunch had revived me nicely. His was more of a philosophical talk regarding the role of robots in society and in the media. He showed multiple movie clip examples of machinery and robots being controlling, dangerous, and in control of the society in which they belonged. It is a fairly common plot theme, because the thought of robots becoming powerful enough to be independent of humans is strange and slightly terrifying. So that talk gave us a lot to think about.
Next, we headed for practice round 2 of the day, which was just an hour long so we only got a few runs in. When the line closed, we still had some code edits we wanted to try, so we were planning on coming back to this third round, which goes from 7-9.
While the Beyond Botball head-to-head rounds were going on, we went on the most anticipated field trip of the week. We, along with our adopted team Notre Dame Academy, headed to the movie theater to see the very appropriately themed Wall-E. It was a great movie, and one of the cutest movies I’ve ever seen. Hannah and I said “aww” at least 50 times. The boys didn’t enjoy it quite as much, especially since most of them dozed off at least once during the show. But I loved it.
Now we are at practice round 3 and still not quite done perfecting our code. After a 6th place score in the seeding round, we’re hoping to do really, really well in head-to-head tomorrow. We’re just adjusting little things, nothing big, just hoping we do our absolute best in the morning.
Practice tables opened today at 8am. Mr. Gras made some joke about going for a run this morning, like they do in the military, but somehow the idea didn’t catch on. However, he still wanted us to start practicing as soon as possible. But knowing how we teenagers would behave this morning after a less than optimal amount of sleep, the Newcastles and he decided that we would be ready at 8, meet in the hallway, and head to breakfast.
So here we are, at Oklahoma University, with half the team waiting in line to practice. It’s nice - having two sets of bots, we can practice twice as much and find mistakes in half the time. The first two runs were bad; the first Legobot did a good job, but both the Creates did badly and so did the second Legobot. But in between practices, everyone runs back to the table to work on what they can, then they get in line to test again. Tomorrow starts seeding rounds, and hopefully by then we’ll be ready.