Sectionals was awesome! Our pit table was right between two teams we've made friends with over the years, Franklin Storm and Leedle Bots. Right from the start of the day, our pit table was swamped with teams and coaches studying our impressive programming code. They had so much to say about our programming, project, and core values booklets that we had out at our table. That was pretty cool. We didn't even have our pit boards up yet since we needed them packed and ready to go for interviews!
We spent the morning rehearsing our skit and prepping for interviews. We were one of the last teams to go through the judging tracks. We really appreciated the extra time in the morning. Our interviews went really well! We headed back to the pits smiling and feeling more confident about the day.
We had some issues that weren't our fault during the robot matches in the afternoon. It was especially nerve wracking when they started the match before we were ready and they were still resetting our field! We lost time because of that. A couple other things happened too, but we still pulled through. Our robot, Benny Hopper, performed fairly well for us. In the end our highest score was 430 points, giving us the rank of 14th place out of 48 teams.
Finally it was time for the awards ceremony...
We won the 1st place research award!!!
Not only that, but we were also nominated for more awards than any other team! That was special and made us smile from ear to ear. We were also up for champions and got nominated for it in the awards ceremony! When announcing which 18 teams will move on to state, we were the first listed! So...
We are going to state!
Our excitement level is through the roof! Many of the teams we made friends with will move on too!
To continue our tradition, we met together as a team for dinner at Culver's and held our own in-team awards ceremony with special awards for each team member.
What an excellent finish to the many weeks of hard work and dedication. Now we plan to take a break over Christmas and New Years and meet back together after the holidays to prepare for state. We are looking forward to seeing some of our favorite teams there too!
We are a 4-H FIRST LEGO League team from Waukesha, WI. Our team and the FIRST organization are for inspiration and recognition of science and technology, driven by gracious professionalism. In our 9-year history, we've been awarded Teamwork, Robot Performance, three Innovative Solutions, three Inspirations, 1st and 2nd place Research, two Champions, two Runners up Champions, 2nd Place Alliance, 3rd Place Core Values, and yes, even Gracious Professionalism. In all things, TEAMwork counts!
