This weekend was the 3rd Annual Where Is Wolcott Invitational (or WIWI) as we like to call it. This is where Team MAX, build the game field from this years FIRST Robotics game in the Wolcott High School gym and runs a day long competition.
This was our biggest competition ever with 23 teams. Three of them were particularly cool. We had one team made up of mentors from any of the competing teams who wanted a shot at driving a robot (I found out quite how difficult it was). We also had two brand new pre-rookie teams that will be joining FIRST next year from Kennedy High School in Waterbury, CT and Goodwin Tech High School in New Britain, CT. Reaching into your community to help others get started is an essential part of the FIRST experience and it was great to see how well the folks did (they certainly didn’t drive like rookies).
It was a really hot, humid day, and we did have some technical difficulties in the morning getting all the robots to talk nicely to the field, but we battled through (thanks Mike!) and the afternoon went really well. It turned into a really exciting competition. with at one stage four robots hanging off the floor at the same time.
One of the fun things we do is have a human game in a break during the day. This year we had team members take the place of the robots. They had to crab walk and kick the ball and for the first 20 seconds (when the robots work autonomously) the humans were blindfolded. It was a great game and a lot of fun. I think we probably could have turned it into a full competition in its own right.
As always, our friends over at Team GUS provided the best food you could ever imagine.
Thanks to everyone who took part. It was exhausting but a whole lot of fun!
You can see everyone’s thoughts here
:: Justin ::