2016 FIRST Championships

Last month we packed up our robot and traveled to Saint Louis for the FIRST World Championships in St. Louis, April 27th to April 30th. St. Louis was filled with fun and excitement. We shipped Byte off through FedEx weeks before and our amazing mentor Chuck drove a van all the way to Missouri full of our tools so all of our stuff was there when we arrived. The team’s bus left early in the morning on Wednesday, April 27th and drove through the day getting settled in St. Louis by the afternoon.

That day we unpacked the van and the crate and got the pit set up.

Then we got situated in our hotel which was located right next to the arch! Some of us even had a view of it from our room. After a practice match, Wednesday ended with a team meeting and an early bedtime. Thursday we walked to the Edward Jones Dome and began to compete in qualification matches. The day got off to an amazing start and our first alliance was able to hold off some pretty great teams. Matches continued to be awesome for the rest of the day.

Right before the Opening Ceremonies Dean Kamen, Megan Smith, Andrew Coy, and Kate Gage stopped by our pit to say “hey!” and to put it honestly we were pretty excited.

The team attended opening ceremonies then headed back to the hotel to get ready for the always fun Roboprom! Lucky for us Roboprom was hosted in our hotel! After a fun night we went to bed and got ready for another great day. Friday was once again full of more fun and qualification matches.

We competed in the FedEx grant competition and even though we didn’t win we thoroughly enjoyed running around and trying to do physics problems. You know you are at a STEM competition when everyone offers up their graphing calculators.

We even got to meet representatives from one our most generous sponsors, Comcast NBCUniversal, on Friday! The evening was rounded off by the an ever eventful trip to the City Museum. On Saturday we attended the awards ceremony and saw many friends get recognized for their hard work! The day consisted of pit packing, exploring, and of course watching many more matches. This year we arranged our schedule and were able to attend the closing ceremonies and go to the finale party. What an experience Champs was! Yay for creating more connections with our FIRST community, inspiring some Rosies of the future, and hopefully awakening some innovation in a few of our members too.