On February 15th, 2020, Girls of Steel hosted eight other FRC teams at our annual Week Zero Scrimmage. This year it was held at our new practice facility at CMU on Penn Avenue near Bakery Square. This was our 9th year running a Week Zero event!
The day started at 10:00 AM, with teams being welcomed into our new practice field space at Carnegie Mellon by Girls of Steel members. Teams could set up around the field and make adjustments to their robots before practice matches started at 11:00 AM.
We broke for lunch after the last practice match at 12:00, and then scrimmage matches started at 1:00.
We hosted fourteen scrimmage matches, with each team competing in at least nine matches. It was exciting to see each team’s robot compete, and exciting to collaborate with other teams ahead of the official Infinite Recharge season!
The FRC teams in attendance were 117 Steel Dragons, 4467 Titanium Titans, 3260 SHARP, 4150 FRobotics, 2051 Beattie Bulldogs, 1708 AMP’d Robotics, 2656 Quasics, and 4027 Centre County 4-H Robotics.
An exciting part of the day happened before some of the last matches, in which each team sent a representative to compete in a human match! Team members had the opportunity to show off their knowledge of the game and skill by competing against each other as if they were robots. We saw power cells scored in all levels, defense, spinning of the control panel wheel, and a hang from every member of both alliances! Everyone who competed had a lot of fun, and it was a ton of fun to watch!
To each team in attendance, congrats on completing such amazing robots! We enjoyed learning about each of your robots and why you chose to specialize subsystems and focus on certain aspects of the game. Robots scored power cells in each level, ran autonomous code, and some robots even perfected their hang! It was awesome to see the problem-solving, collaboration, and gracious professionalism shown by every team!
In the middle of the afternoon, we took a group picture, then continued on with any remaining scrimmage matches.
Members of other teams shared their thoughts from the event:
“The practice field was great and my team had a good time.”
“It was a good day, although we didn’t get on the field as much as we wanted to, we had a great time!”
“The scrimmage was a good experience to see how our robot could perform and what we needed to change ahead of competition.”
The Week Zero Scrimmage was a great way to practice and assess problems ahead of upcoming regionals. Teams are invited to join us at the field during drive team practices on Wednesdays and Fridays. Contact us at girlsofsteelrobotics @gmail.com for more details.
From Girls of Steel, we wish all the teams good luck during the competition season, and we hope to see some of you at Miami Valley Regional and/or Greater Pittsburgh Regional! Thanks for being a part of the Pittsburgh FIRST community!