Wednesday February 13th 2008. From today, we have exactly one week to ship the robot. This season started very well. The concept of simplicity was spinning around every body heads and this year was the first year we did something different. Instead of taking two and a half weeks to design and prototype, the student body decided to design and prototype a robot by the first week. Then we would hand over the hand drawn sketches to our designers and they would generate an AutoCAD design for us. This concept actually worked out great. Although the design review was very hectic and reiterating, most of us came out in one piece.
Apart from the fact of building quick, this year, we had gotten Lynnwood High School which is a neighboring school in our district to start a robotics team. When we went there to recruit, we had about 15 people interested, of those 15, three or four came regularly. We also got Dan Terry to donate 80/20 material which was very fascinating and made life a lot easier.
Two legendary mentors had joined our team this year, Brad Nelson, and Ray Gibbs. We appreciate these two mentors for taking their time to help and encourage students in science and technology. We have learned lots “life skills” from these mentors.
The 2008 robot has the same concept of the 2007 robot but with major changes in design. Unlike lifting an object vertically from the front of the robot, we have decided upon a robot which lifts a 40” diameter, 10 pound ball from the front but now has a 63 degrees angle tilt. Essentially, our robot is a giant triangle shaped robot. The cascading arm is lifted with a lead screw and the carriage is being mechanically driven, and the tilt mechanism is run by a globe motor.
Our first regional for the season was the Oregon Reigonal down in Portland.
We secondly attended the Microsoft Seattle Regional down in Tacoma. We went into it with our spirits high and ready to win. Only problem was that we lost our first match and we also lost it to our rookie team that we mentored too, Lynnwood High School. Once the match was over we congradulated them and then we realized we needed to just pick our heads up and keep on moving with a positive attitude. And thats what we did and by doing so that was the only match we lost that day. We walked out of the arena that day with the record 7-0-1 and ranked 1st on the leaderboards.. We were all jumping for joy as this was the first time we were the top ranked team at this point in the game.
MTHS Robotics 