On Tuesday, February 16th, we had our junior members shadow some of our older high school members around for the night as girls worked on the two robots, Byte and Bug. “Shadowing a girl has significantly developed me as a FIRST participant and this experience will further me in the coming years,” said junior member, Kavya. Now that the FTC season has ended, the junior members will be shadowing every Tuesday.
On Wednesday night our drive team met at the practice field for their regular meeting and a group of Cub Scouts from Pack 600 visited to learn about robots and FIRST. They also explored the field elements and took turns driving our outreach-bot, Atlas. They were great company to have and quite awesome drivers. One of the boys proudly exclaimed that he was the one who broke the robot!
Thursday we met again and packed tools and tidied up for Saturday, as well as putting the finishing touches on our robot that could not be done at the practice field.
On Saturday, February 20th, we had our 5th annual Week Zero Scrimmage with a total of 10 teams from the Pittsburgh area! We held practice matches throughout the day and teams drove through defenses, scored goals, and even scaled the tower. Our eight matches went smoothly! All in all, it was a great time and we’re happy to have had teams 117, 1708, 2656, 2641, 3260, 3954, 3955, 4150, and 4467 join us. One SHARP 3260 member said “I’m having a great time. It’s fantastic to see all these teams together in one place!”. There were a couple of defenses destroyed, but thankfully our mentors and parents are always on their feet to fix them right away! More photos are available here.
Monday, the day before Bag & Tag, we met back again at CMU in hopes to get everything remotely close to done and packed for Bag & Tag, which was held at the practice field.With pizza ordered, and encouraging music playing, we worked hard and stayed up late to conclude the 2016 Stronghold build season. We look forward to our first competition at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional on March 10-12!
