Nevada FTC 2011

Team 3491, FIX IT, were at the Nevada State FTC Championship held on Jan. 29, 2011.

FTC teams are encouraged to enter up to three Championship tournaments during the season.  We chose the Nevada State Championship as one of our tournaments.

Las Vegas is easy to get to from Victoria, and there's always something interesting to see while we're there!

After the Seattle Regional Tournament, the team decided on a complete redesign of the robot.  A lot of the changes were done over Christmas, but there's always more to do.

After a lot of hours the week before the tournament, and all day Friday, the robot was mostly working by the morning of the tournament. 

The six wheel drive system worked OK. When Ian removed the hand on the arm, Katherine replaced it with a cup dispenser. There wasn't much time to practice with it, but they could dispense preloads in the rolling goal, pick batons up off the mat, and even find magnet batons. On the practice field, they were able to find and score the magnet baton twice.

Unfortunately, the dispenser was out of commission all day. The plan was to look for the magnet baton in any match were a team dispensed a lot of batons to the field. That never happened. Other than the pre-loads, there was never more than 5 batons loose on the field. We didn't even get to try finding the magnet batons.

Our team finished qualifying rounds ranked 6 out of 25 teams. We won 3 out of 5 matches and tied one match. The top four teams choose alliance partners. 

Throughout the day, we noticed that teams did more marketing of their team and robot to other teams then we had seen at other events. Katherine and Ian were kept busy just getting the robot ready and running matches.   In two of our matches, we had been partnered with teams that were alliance captains. We won both matches and our team made a difference in those matches (e.g. we scored batons and the doubler in the rolling goal earning the winning points). 

Much to our surprise, of the 12 teams in the finals, we weren't one of them.

Our team was nominated for 3 awards.

Innovate - unique design of robot or distinctive features
Think - excellent record of the season in the Engineering Notebook
Inspire - top award, team is significant contender in for all awards.

We won the Think award! All the time and effort we put into documenting ideas, designs and testing is being recognized. The work of the whole team contributed to our winning this award!

Find out more about sponsoring the FIX IT team.