I think we can all agree SKYSTONE was a whirlwind. We started off the season with a bang at League 1 and League 2. We performed the best we ever had and won 4 out of 5 matches at both events. At Interleague, we had issues with our tracking wheels overheating which hindered our game play. Nonetheless, our hard work still paid off, and we advanced to State through the Inspire Award! State was a total blast! We ranked 6th and were the 1st pick of the 3rd alliance. We defied the odds and made it to the Finals! Unfortunately, we did not advance to Worlds, but we were lucky enough to be awarded with a Connect nomination as well! Our hearts go out to the teams who can no longer go to the World Championship due to COVID-19. The good news is, next season is a fresh start. Let's get excited!
0 Comments
During the 2018-2019 season, we won the Judges award for our big scoring operation. We wanted to create a graph that would help us, and other teams use robot performance. We created a system with other teams, where we would score each match, focusing on robot performance. With many teams scoring with us, we tallied and counted up each point, scanning the sheets into the system. Madeleine, the mastermind behind the whole idea, used Tableau to put all of the data in readable, understandable form. She compiled all of the information and put them in graphs, tables, and other data tables. We posted the data to the reddit page, and many teams said that it was helpful to them. For the future, we wish to make the process quicker and better organized so that we don’t scramble near the end.
On April 15th, we headed out for our second world championship as an FTC team. Hosted in the George R. Brown Convention center, it was the combined event of all levels of FIRST, from FLL jr. to FRC. The multiple day event encompasses all portions of a normal event, on a larger scale. We played through each of our qualification matches, and won one of them, but still placed higher than we did last year. Because of our gigantic scoring operation, we won the judges award at the event. We were incredibly honored with their recognition of what our team did during the event. The judges noticed our system of using other teams to collectively score every match in every division. The even wasn’t just an event for us to win and play matches, but to be a better team. We had fun together and had many challenges throughout the week, from teams dropping out on us last minute to errors on the field. Many teams were brought together from around the world to participate, and we had a blast! On March 17th, we attending the Washington State Championships at the ShoWare center. We played in seven qualifications matches and won about half of them. We were selected to be apart of an alliance, but we did not win. We advanced to the World Championship through first runner-up for the Inspire Award. We are very excited to be going to Worlds!
This season, our team attended to state championship events: Washington and Idaho State. Both events were amazing, and we had a lot of fun! Thank you so much to all the volunteers who came out to those events to make them possible! To get to the Idaho State championship, which was held at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, we rented a 15-person van and travelled to the event by car. At the Idaho event, we got to meet many new teams. It was definitely interesting to see some differences between regions with terminology and setups used. During the Qualification Matches, we placed 1st, which made us the 1st seed alliance. With our alliance, #11970 Titanium Talons and #12744 Bruin Blue Crew, we ended as the finalist alliance. We were surprised to receive the Inspire Award at this event! We did not advance from this event because we already advanced from the Washington State Championship. It was a new and fun experience for the team! The Washington State Championship was held at the ShoWare Center in Kent. As well as competition and judging, FIRST WA also invited some Girl Scouts to look at the robots and talk to teams about the program. In Qualification matches, we placed 4th due to our surprisingly consistent filling of the cryptobox (some of our match videos can be found here). Our team ended up being third seed alliance captain. With our alliance members #11120 CPR (Cedar Park Robotics) and #13648 Jankbot we ended as finalist alliance captain. We were thrilled to won Design Award and be 3rd nominated for Inspire, which meant we qualified for the West Super Regional in Spokane, Washington!
We wrote a blog post for Society for Women Engineering Pacific Northwest (SWE PNW). Please go check it out!
After having some significant robot failures: upside-down vision targets messed up our Vuforia (on the field we ran on three times!), we had to update to the alpha branch on GitHub, and we will need to learn more about electrostatic shock (Our wifi connection kept failing). These problems caused problems during our first three qualification rounds, but luckily we were able to mostly recover our robot and felt really lucky to be picked by team #3805 Atomic Robotics. Our alliance with them and #2856, Tesseract, won the Final rounds. In addition to advancing for second pick of the winning alliance, we were very surprised to receive the Inspire Award. Thank you to all the volunteers who organized this event, we had so much fun despite our robot mishaps!
Our project this year was to try to reduce the production of meat and bones. Some municipal composting facilities will not accept meat or bones in their compost because meat is a health hazard to handlers of the compost and bones take a very long time to decompose. Our team decided that people should eat more insects instead of meat. We specifically chose crickets because they are not perceived very disgusting - just picture crickets. Most people will think of a happy and calm evening.
We found that most people will not eat insects because of the "Yuck" factor, which means that the majority of people find them disgusting. There are many reasons why you should consume more insects. Because crickets do not have bones, they decompose more quickly than meat. They also have more vitamins and proteins than beef. It only takes one liter of water to raise one kilograms of crickets while it takes 22,000 liters to raise one kilograms of beef. Crickets are very cheap and easy to raise, you can even make a cricket farm in your own home! We have created two pamphlets that will help people get over the "Yuck" factor. One pamphlet is called "Entomophagy Made Fun and Easy" this pamphlet will help you learn to enjoy eating crickets, to help you forget your disgust. The second pamphlet is called "Entomophagy Made Easy: Part 2 - Recipes". This pamphlet has recipes and tips for cooking crickets. Some of the recipes we included are cookies, fried crickets, and fried rice, which can help you bring crickets into your daily diet. Please feel free to downland and print a copy of the pamphlets. You can find the pamphlets on the Espousing Entomophagy page of our website. The Bearded Pineapples have discovered that consuming crickets can reduce the production of meat and bones. There are many hazards and problems when meat and bones are put in the compost. We hope our pamphlets will help you on your journey to cricket eating. -The Bearded Pineapples |
Archives
April 2020
Categories |