Carmicheal Qualifier

January 8, 2017

This qualifier was the most successful qualifier that we have ever participated in. Throughout the various aspects of our tournament, we had showed much more improvement compared to our past tournaments. During our judging review, we were able to highlight the various strengths of our robot such as our collection mechanism and drive train. Another one of our focuses was the engineering notebook and our CAD designs. We had effectively been documenting our meeting and the judges had taken notice of this. With our CAD designs complementing our robot design, the judges were able to attain a deep understanding of the history of our robot and how it had functioned.

The robot games had given invaluable experiences and skills that we can effectively utilize in the future. Since we were placed into matches with tough opponents.  In our first match, we were forced to learn to strategize with alliance partners, which helped later on helped us throughout the competition. In the rest of our qualifying matches we used this strategy to effectively focus on the opponent’s weakness to help us win the match. In our winning alliance matches, our team had a heavy focus on shooting while our alliance partner had a heavy focus on beacon pressing. Because of this “divide and conquer” strategy, our team was able to effectively score more points than the opposing team.

This is our drivers getting ready for a qualifying match

Our drivers strategizing with our winning alliance partners on how to win our final match

In the end all of our hard work paid off! We won the PTC Design Award, was part of the Winning Alliance, and was 6th place overall. this qualifier really helped us learn valuable skills that we could use in later qualifiers and tournaments.