On Saturday Mckenna had her regional competition for her robotics team. She has been working after school for two months with a team of students to program a lego robot.  Finally it was time to see if all that work would pay off…

I had to take her to the local high school where the competition was taking place at 7:45am (love waking up early on Saturdays!) dropped her off with her team and then Omar and I had some time to go eat breakfast and he had a soccer game (to WIN, ’cause he’s awesome!). We ended up coming back to her competition around noon, just when the actual competing was going to start.

The competition, it was pretty cool!

It was pretty exciting. The teams went head to head with a two and a half minute time limit to have their robots perform as many programmed tasks as possible. There were three rounds and the highest score was the only one that counted. Mckenna had two different teams from her school enter, and only the top 5 teams get to continue on to state so there was a lot of pressure.

In the first round their robot didn’t do too well, they had a couple of mistakes and weren’t able to get too many tasks completed. Mckenna was pretty bummed at this point because their score put them in 14th place out of 19 teams. Thankfully there were two more rounds and her team did much better, getting up to 5th place. We then had to wait for the judges to tally the rest of the scores, there was a skit, a teamwork score, and robot design.

Well, Mckenna’s school did AWESOME! Both teams made it into the top five which means that both teams go onto state next month.

Terrible cell pic, sorry, if you look close you can see Shafterbots came in first and fifth!

Mckenna’s team also won a best design! This was a huge accomplishment and I am SO proud of her awesome team!

Go Shafterbots Silver!

So onto State! The teams are excited and determined to do just as well!

Oh and here is a bonus, during some downtime the (incredible!) A/V students at Moanaloa h.s. had the teams come down and dance. It was hilarious!