This Saturday, April 29, the North Hollywood Botball team, sponsored by Mr. Lewis, won second place at a competition hosted by Providence High School in Burbank. There were 20 teams competing from various schools around Southern California, including many private schools; our team was the only one without matching T-shirts. All teams brought to the competition two robots they had to design, build, and program themselves to accomplish a specific task. One robot had to climb up a ramp, grab pink puffballs, lift them up, and place them in a bucket, while the other moved around on a flat surface in the manner of a robotic vacuum and moved a yellow foam block representing a bale of hay under the ramp.
The rounds in the morning determined initial rank (seed placement), since during the rounds in the afternoon, teams would directly compete against each other. Despite the fact that one of their robots hadn’t been working at the beginning, our team “destroyed” the placement rounds, according to the team captain, and gained the first seed placement. This meant their first head-to-head round would be against the team that initially placed 20th. After some pizza and chocolate, the NoHo Botball team was in a good mood and felt optimistic about their chances of “actually win[ning] this thing,” as one team member phrased it. “This is definitely the best we’ve done since I’ve been on the team,” reported a Junior. However, after reviewing the videos of their robots during the placement rounds, the team decided that some adjustments were necessary and spent the next hour fixing their robots’ programming. The NoHo Botball team was very successful in the head-to-head rounds until they faced up against the second-seeded team from Garden Street, a private school in Santa Barbara. During this round, they lost because of technical difficulties, so they had to play the third-seeded team to determine who would play against the team from Garden Street; this round was very close, but they won. This meant they had a second chance to defeat the second-seeded team. The NoHo Botball team used their last time-out to fix some of the technical difficulties and won the round, securing them first place in this portion of the competition. “We wouldn’t have won without on-the-fly programming,” one Freshman stated.
The other components of the competition were documentation (the equivalent of a research journal for a biology lab), which they did not place in, and coding, which did not contribute to the overall score but which they did win a special award for.
The Garden Street team won first place overall; North Hollywood won second place; and a team from Covina School won third place.