Coming back from Christmas break we were prepared to do anything it takes to qualify to the robotics national championship in Iowa. We spent hours upon hours working with our robots in order to compete in the upcoming tournaments in January where we would face off against some of the best teams in the state. After all of our hard work that we put into these robots, the day came for our first tournament of the year, and we wanted to get off to a magnificent start!

Three teams competed that day: 400F (My team), 400C (Dylan Hester’s team), and 400B (Christian Leitzell’s team). We were determined to win trophies that day, and that’s exactly what we did. All of our teams won most of the matches and placed high overall and were rewarded for it. That day we took home two trophies for team 400, 400B won the excellence award, an award that goes to the highest overall ranked team at the tournament who shows great all-around skills.

My team 400F won the design award, which goes to the team that shows great engineering skills in their design process of the team’s Engineering notebook. This tournament gave us the determination to win even more awards at the next tournament, so we spent over 45 hours in the classroom during the past two weeks working on our robots. The day of the new tournament rolled around, and we were extremely confident.

All 400 teams kicked it off with a bang by winning their first matches, but it didn’t stop there. It kept going and going and before we knew it each of our teams went undefeated winning 21 matches total and sitting at the top of the rankings. We continued winning each of our matches and finally we got to the finals where all three of our teams made it. This gave us our first two awards at the tournament by making the tournament finalist.

We played the finals match against each other and 400B (Christian Leitzell) ended up winning and taking home a tournament championship prize (3rd award). But it didn’t stop there; after that battle royal my team, 400F, earned the judges award, which is given by the judges who picks a single team that they think deserves recognition of their skill (4th Award). The next award went to 400C (Dylan Hester’s team) which won the skills award, an award given to the team who scores the most points solo in driving and programming (5th award).

Last but not least, 400B (Christian Leitzell) won the design award which is given to the team who has the best engineering notebook (6th award). Overall, we took six of the eight trophies that we could win at the tournament, which easily qualified our three teams to nationals in Iowa where we look to dominate and take home even more trophies.