So today I continued to push my team to add modifications to the robot. After a little bit of encouragement and showing them a few designs they can make, they decided on:
- a aliner to help them score easier
- an extension to the claw to help them pick up the cones faster
Today is also the day when all the robots that have been created by the different teams compete against each other. It started pretty simply. We lost the first one to the two best teams there. We won the second one by flipping the toggles. For this game, there are four different toggles that control four different sectors, and basically, there are red, blue, and yellow toggles. If you're on the blue team and you switch it to the blue color, your points get magnified in the zone where you flip the toggles.
Since all the robots were pretty bad and couldn't score very well, the game mainly focused on flipping these toggles. After the first game, we realized that our toggle flipper wasn't that great, so we looked at the designs that other teams have been adding to their toggle flippers to make them better. They were able to successfully implement one of them within a couple of minutes. After that, we won two in a row, and then I believe we lost the other two.
After this alliance selection started, and since we were almost in last place, we didn't get to decide who got picked, so we just got placed with a random team. In the semi-finals, since there were only a few teams that were in the semi-finals and finals, there weren't more brackets. We were up against the number one and number four teams. Since the number one team got to pick first, they picked the number four team, who had a really, really good toggle flipper. They picked them because they realized that the game was mainly about flipping these toggles, so we ended up actually beating them by 10 points. We had 15, and they had 5.
After this, we moved on to the finals, and we started off the match not doing too well, but we ended up in the end being able to score a few last-minute points by flipping two of the toggles to our side. We ended up winning the entire tournament. I was pretty surprised at this, considering my team was relatively inexperienced compared to the other teams that were there.
After this, we had to deconstruct the robots that were built. This is a relatively straightforward process, and it only took me around 10 minutes.