Bear Metal in Portland

This weekend was a lot of fun, exhausting, but fun. It's a lot of early mornings and late nights. My parents took the train down and spent the weekend with us so that made it even better!

Our team did really well, making it to the finals. Our drivers didn't have much time to practice and improved as the competition went on. We know we'll be better in Seattle and hopefully take home the win.

Matthew is the main programmer for the team and he was awesome! Everything the robot does is due to the code he wrote. We took home the trophy for software engineering creativity and that was all Matt. We're so proud!

Below is our robot. Each bot pulled a trailer behind them and the goal is to score as many "moon rocks" into your opponents trailers. It was a bit chaotic and hard to see exactly what was going on, but we got into it by the second day.
Here are my boys sporting their fancy trophy and metals.
We took this picture for Ryan... "HAYWIRE" is the team from Pocatello. We kept saying - there's Ryan's team!Here's one of the videos I took. This was the semi-finals I think. I love watching our robot suck up the moon rocks and shoot. (The turning thing on top - all Matthew's code, and what we won the award for. There's a camera that finds the opponents robots and turns towards them. If our robot turns too far away from the target, it swings around to find it again. Fancy!)