4-H Robotics Club competed in Vancouver

The Wahkiakum 4-H Robotics club FIRST Technical Challenge robotics team competed this past week end in Vancouver against Clark County teams. After the parts finished whirring we stand in third place in our League, only two points behind the leader. There is a second League tournament on December 2 in Camas then we go to our regional championships on December 16 in Tacoma. This will determine the top eight teams (out of 38 in our region) who advance to the state championships on February 4 in Kent.

Afterwards, we all felt as Chuck Barton, our team captain, stated when asked what he ate today? He responded: “Knowledge.” We learned a lot about how robots perform and fail to perform, and how to improvise on the fly. Our robot answered the bell in both teleop and autonomous modes for all five of our matches - only two other teams did that. After our second match of the day we decided to radically remodel our robot - they had 10 minutes to rebuild and reprogram their robot - and they did! From a coach’s perspective, it was fun to watch the team make a decision, divide up the tasks and get it done. Our final result was that we won two matches, tied two matches and lost one match. Our robot did not perform as well as we had wanted so we are OK with the results for our first time out.

Team members who made the trip this past weekend: Chuck Barton (captain and lead programmer), Morgan Bashore (builder, driver and engineering lead), Jonny Berry (builder and driver), Damaris Blalock (assistant programmer, builder and driver), Lydia Blalock (communications and lead scout). Team members who could not make the trip: Camille Kolditz (driver and builder) and Ryan McKay-Beach (communications).