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Hello, Robolions team members, mentors, friends, and community members! Welcome to "The Fourth Law of Robotics," home to University City High School's FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team. We hope to use this blog to inform you about what we're up to.
We compete in the FRC (First Robotics Competition), an annual competition where we have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. This year's game is Recycle Rush. We'll post updates here to let you all know what we're up to with building (and competing with) our robot!
We also are now competing in FTC (First Tech Challenge), the next level down from FRC. The game was called Ring It Up!

Thursday, April 28, 2011

First day at Championship!

It was a great first (FIRST, haha no pun intended!) day at the International Competition! We met teams from all over- Mexico, Canada, Australia, Israel, and more! There were also teams from all around the country- even Hawaii!

Competitions went smoothly. Our new arm design worked like a dream, until it broke in the last match. But it will be an easy fix. Anyways, we won 3 of our 4 matches, and currently our team is placed in 12th out of 88 teams. It's very exciting! There are so many good teams there- everyone has amazing robots. And of course, everyone is super nice :) Our newest member, Chip, commented on that when he got to the competition, saying "Everyone here is so nice! They just come up and talk to you!" He's right- it's a great, friendly competition!

For those of you who are interested in the mechanics of the competition, I'll just give a few details on that. We have been playing defense, with our new arm designed to fold down and take tubes to our alliance's side of the field, essentially stealing them from the other team. It works well. We have also been blocking the other teams from getting to their pegs to hang the tubes. We choose our strategy depending on who we are up against. If it's a team that's very good at scoring, we will usually try to block them. If it's a team that's a bit slower, we just steal tubes from them, and give them to our team members to hang on our pegs.

Tomorrow is another day of qualification rounds, and our first match is at 10:54 on Galileo field, which is in the Dome. Our cheering section is section 115, so if you would like to come watch, you can find Ucity fans there :) Be sure to wear your black and gold!!

To see pictures from the competition, you can become a fan of us on Facebook. Here's our page: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.204837612889946.52752.100562556650786&saved#!/pages/UCHS-Robolions/100562556650786

Tomorrow night is the big FIRST concert/party thing as well. will.i.am and "special guests"- we're hoping the rest of the Black Eyed Peas- are going to be there, as well as the famous Dean Kamen, and rumor has it that Morgan Freeman is going to be there too! They will be walking around the pits, hopefully we will catch a glimpse and maybe get an autograph or two!

One last thing- our views  have gone over 1,000! Thanks to all of our readers! Be sure to share us with your friends and coworkers, and see you at the competition! Peace!

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