Hello everyone! The past couple of weeks have been full of excitement.  We recently took our robot, Ada, to the Buckeye Regional Competition in Cleveland, Ohio. This year we were one of three all girls teams competing at Buckeye – Murphy’s Outlaws (FRC 677), Fighting Unicorns (FRC 2399), and Girls of Steel (FRC 3504).  The Fighting Unicorns invited us to a delicious ice cream social with ice cream graciously donated by Mitchell’s Ice Cream of Cleveland.

It was inspiring to see the true spirit of FIRST at the competition as both teams cheered beside us for all of our matches.  We, of course, cheered with enthusiasm for them, too!

We are incredibly proud of how our robot performed.  Based on a lot of hard work, Ada has had a major overhaul and works better than ever.  For this regional, we decided to focus on stacking, which we mostly do from the human player station.  Ada’s stacking is at it’s best because of the improvements we made to the grippers.  The grippers no longer have rubber on them but the extensions we added made our stacking more efficient.

We are looking into bigger pistons for our grippers so they can hold on tightly to the totes.  Our team also attempted Coopertition® almost every match and it paid off.  In addition to all of our excitement about our robot and its new capabilities, we are overjoyed to have received the Regional Chairman’s award!

The Chairman’s award is a huge milestone for us and has involved hundreds of people and was awarded after five years and thousands of hours of work. Watch our Chairman’s video here! We are thrilled to be going to champs for the fifth year in a row!

The sponsors, mentors, parents, and students have all made the Regional Chairman’s Award possible, but more importantly they have helped us make a huge impact on the community and younger students.

Also, we would like to say Congratulations to all of the qualifying teams!  See you in St. Louis!