Offseason Competitions

The most stressful part of robotics this year was the off-season competitions. Not only did I have an immense amount of responsibilities on the two-three days of the competitions, all the while I would also be falling behind on homework from other classes.

As the scouting lead, I was to keep track of 12 (or more) rowdy students, some were older than me, most were my peers. This made me sympathize with wanting to play games, yet I still had to push them to scout. I tried to make schedules more lenient so that they would have longer breaks, but sometimes there was simply not enough manpower to do so. Not only did I have to ensure the data was being collected, I would also have to be vigilant for clearly wrong data. Because many students were new to robotics, I also had to teach them the rules game and how to use the app, which is becoming more complicated for the sake of more complete data. Outside of competitions, I made a couple of QOL changes to the scouting app app.

This year, for the first time, we had a dedicated pit strategist, Zoe Cheng. I worked with Zoe to analyze data and come up with match strategies and things to look out for, and she would later pass this information to our drive team and our alliance members. This was challenging in the beginning of each competition, when we had less data to work off of. However, it proved to be a worthwhile effort, as we were pretty successful when our robot was working.

In addition to the normal scouting lead duties, I also wanted to learn some code, and attempted to debug whenever the robot broke at competitions. I was unsuccessful most of the time.

It was not all bad, however, every travel competition came with the opportunity to get to know the team better, to mess about in the hotel lobby. This year, I was proud to continue the tradition of Team 114 apple cider, and nightly mahjong games.

Absolutely fire starting hand (I lost this game)