FIRST

Saturday April 23, 2005

We started the morning off with an exciting victory. There was one undefeated robot on the opposing team that had not lost a game. The strategy was to have Cristian drive into their backfield and prevent him from scoring. That’s exactly what he did. It was a game of high speed maneuvering and anticipating moves. It was an awesome match up. We handed them their only defeat.

Out second match was exciting also, but we lost. We played a great defense, but without our ally robots scoring, we really had no chance of wining.

We were treated to lunch by some administrators and students from Purdue University. Sometimes I report too much about the competitive aspects of the FIRST experience and not enough about the friends we make. Purdue held a regional competition this year and they think it is a terrific way to recruit perspective students into their engineering program, including students from Arizona. They were a fun group of people.

All day yesterday and today, Cindy and Viri have visited all 340 teams and asked them for team t-shirts. They must have close to one hundred now and they plan to make a quilt with the t-shirt designs. It’s a great idea.

Dan Green from ABC news and his crew have been filming us today. He is quite a guy. He had a meeting with Dean Kamen and talked Dean into coming and visiting us in our pit area. We took photos and had a nice visit. He mentioned quite a few people sent him the Wired article.

Late afternoon everyone was in the Georgia dome. We felt we had a very good chance to win the highest award, the Chairman’s Award. It was not to be. We won the second place award, the Engineering Inspiration Award, a first for the state of Arizona and by for the best we have ever done at FIRST.

We all experienced a strange set of emotions: joy for winning the second highest award, and disappointment for not winning the first place award. I guess that is how silver medalists in the Olympics feel. Everyone is proud that we genuinely did our best to promote math, science and engineering in our school and community and we have the most graciously professional young men and women but I think the kids will somehow do even more in the next 12 months.

We spent the last hour this evening in our hotel room with a team from Washington state. They are interested in expanding their team into the MATE ROV tournament..

It’s been quite a day (and some of it will be on Nightline in a week or two) and I’m tired, Good night

Allan