2018 Houston Championship Recap
Mitchell Way - Head Mentor - Team 7277 Mandela United Robotics Team
I have to start this article with a disclaimer: I intended for this to be a report style recap of the events that saw us take 16 student to the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Championship in Houston Texas; what this actually turned into was a log of the learning that went on leading up to and during this championship.
Nelson Mandela High School was founded on a handful of principles titled “The Mandela Way” that talk about what we are as a school. These include the need to have strong relationships and to commit to authentic, real-world learning, and being positive citizens of the world. That real world learning hit me shortly after the elation of winning the Rookie All Star Award at the Western Canadian Regionals at Genesis Centre at the beginning of April.
As teachers, we fight constantly for the ability to control our workplaces and keep the events around us as controlled as possible. This causes a problem when you start asking question like “what is the shortest amount of time that you need to plan an out of-country trip?” (The answer to which is, by the way, eleven days) Those type of moonshot-type questions lead to a really awkward feeling for someone who becomes so used to their own small, controlled world at work. It’s a feeling that is like a pit in your chest, a hole in your gut that keeps asking you hard questions: Can we make this happen? If we commit can we pull out if things go wrong? Will the team’s parent’s support this? Will the school board support this?
Now walking around with a pit in your stomach is an unpleasant feeling that gets made all the worse as you price out flights that are constantly changing, contact parents to try and get support and navigate the process of planning a major trip within the context of a large school.
In teaching theory they say that your students learn the most when they are functioning on the edge of their current capabilities, this is true. It is also true that teachers can operate on that same principle and Teresa and I did for most of those eleven days. In the end, eleven days after qualifying for a world championships, sixteen students left the tarmac at YYC with a sleep deprived Robotics teacher and their principal in tow to drive their robot with the best in the world.
Day 1 - The Hardest Fun Ever
In an ideal world we would have landed in Houston, checked in to the hotel, and then headed off to tinker with our robot. As it happens, eleven days notice doesn’t give you a prime pick of hotels and so we headed to the venue, via city bus, with all of our bags and luggage unable to drop them off until later that night.
Downtown Houston is a lot like downtown Calgary except that it is hot, humid, and there is no chance it will randomly snow on you; so envision our group of North East Calgary kids trudging down Lamar Street carrying all manners of carryon luggage and backpacks looking like a bunch of tourists and wondering why their clothes had been sticking to them since they landed.
Discovery Green was our first point of contact. It is a fantastic park in front of the George Brown Convention Centre where the Championships are held. We made camp there, and scarfed down some lunch; the first of a bunch of Subway runs during the week.
Robotics competitions are stressful. They are frantic, inflexible, complex animals, with no room for error.
To make things work at this level you need to fly by the seat of your pants a bit as you are far from home-base and in a deep-deep pool of skills and passion for engineering. We took our load-in team into the convention centre and were floored by just how large this thing was. Six fields are set end to end with each field hosting around 70 teams.
As our veterans of one whole robotics competition entered their World Championship pits they set to work. They unboxed the robot and then set the crate up as our workbench. They broke out the ratchets and disassembled the entire drivetrain.
Now, I personally have participated in two whole FIRST Robotics events, both in Calgary, and I knew that it was a bad idea to disassemble the whole drivetrain hours before a major competition.
I was overruled by the mechanical team.
In a flurry of turned bolts, clanking metal, and greying hair, the gearboxes and side plates came off. They were back on in record time and then catastrophe struck. When we fired the robot back up, the right drive was stuck.
Damn.
Now students in FRC are taught how to troubleshoot problems. We knew that the list of things that could cause this included: dead motors, bad electrical connections, bad code, a stuck bolt or axle. This flowchart often leads to a typical progression: the Mechanical Team blames the Robotics Systems Team for the motors and electrical, the Robotics Systems Team blames the Programming Team for the code problems, the Programming Team then blame the Mechanical Team for adhesions in the drivetrain.
Tyler, our Robotic Systems lead is the one who blew the problem open after we had the gearboxes opened. He picked up the main drive gears from the left and right gearboxes and held them in front of his face, “Are these supposed to be different sizes?”
So it turns out we ran the entire Calgary competition with two differently geared sides of our robot. No wonder the programming team had been ripping their hair out trying to make the thing drive straight.
After a quick trip to AndyMark to get the right size of gear the robot drove in a way that resembled a more sober machine.
In my last story, about the Canadian Rockies Regional, I mentioned that the best stories end at 3AM at a Denny’s. This day’s story ends at midnight with Dominoes pizza in a hotel room, which is almost as good. As we sat and debriefed it really settled in.
We were at Worlds.
We were competing internationally.
We had arrived.
Day 2 - Falling Apart
Being a rookie team is typified by a few things:
- Uncertainty of how to get to the end-goal.
- Limited abilities to solve technical problems.
- Having to mess things up to learn from those mistakes.
Day two was all about making those mistakes and learning from them.
Match one came and went without us.
Seriously, our number, 7277, crossed out on the game sheet. We went to the match, were told by the official that we weren’t up for an hour and left.
We were up. He misread the board. I misread the board.
You live and you learn.
Match two it was time for the students to show what they could do. “Ready, set, Power Up!
Within 30 seconds the robot was disabled in the middle of the field with its bumper hanging off and it’s battery on the carpet accuring penalty points for our alliance.
“Mr.Way, we didn’t engineer this robot to last more than one competition!”
It’s hard to describe the feeling of disappointment you feel after all of the hours of work that go into a major endeavor like this, just to watch it fall apart right when you need things to work.
...but remember what we said about learning from those mistakes?
In a moment of clarity the team decided to go for lunch after that match as we had a significant break before the next attempt. At that point the team decided to rebuild the battery holder.
The dictionary defines rebuild as:
rēˈbild - verb - build (something) again after it has been damaged or destroyed. The term rebuild doesn't come with the connotation of re-engineering something with a 60 minute deadline.
Again, I suggested against creating a new battery holder. Again, the mechanical team pushed to do the big task in the small time. Again, I turned my back for a minute and the team did it anyway.
This would have been far more frustrating if the team had failed at any of these endeavors...they didn’t.
We won match three in a defensive push-bot role and were starting to look like a proper working robot. And after losing our last match of the day, we ended day one ranked 52nd out of 67 teams in Galileo Division and a majority of our matches to play on Friday. We had a working robot, a slightly more heartened team and a welcome party to attend at Discovery Green.
I want to point out that the FRC World Championships are the kind of place where everyone helps everyone out. It also helps to have some personal friends when all is going wrong around you. We drew heavily on EP Scarlett, another Calgary school, who stepped up to led us bolts and fasteners as well as a friend of mine, Clay Scales who stepped up with a robot cart and a power drill for us.
Clay, a Houston resident and literal rocket scientist, was a part of a past Calgary robotics project when he helped mentor Team 5296 The Iron Falcon during the 2015 Recycle Rush competition. The robotics world is a small place so to speak.
Day 3 - The Great Rebound
Advance planning can prevent many problems. You plan for what tools you will need, what parts might break on a robot, what events might befall your World Championship efforts.
...You don’t plan for Windows updates.
So after getting soundly beaten the first two games on Friday the team trekked off to queue for their match with a working robot and a laptop at 15% of an update.
I slumped in my seat in the bleachers next to our team and said, “well, let’s hope that the machine spirits are with us today.”
Lucky for us, the team’s computer, moved by our vocal encouragement completed it’s update before Match 75. In that match we managed to play defence and contribute enough to help our team to a 394-390 win.
We followed that up with a victory in Match 96 where we accomplished out first buddy climb of the competition.
At the end of an exhausting three days team 7277 came away with a 3-7 record at their very first World Championship. There had been frustration, anger, broken parts, and deep, deep learning.
Not bad for this group’s second attempt at FRC.
Day 4 - The Best In The World
Selling a trip like this on everyone who needed to be involved turned out to be quite easy because our goal was simple: We wanted to see what the best teams in the world do to win at the Worlds.
We saw the best do that on Saturday in the most spectacular way.
At a FIRST Robotics Competition teams are ranked at the end of the qualifiers and then a draft occurs to determine who goes to the playoffs. At a FRC Championship this happens on all eight divisional fields at once.
We knew that Galileo field wasn’t going to choose the 50th ranked team, but were there to witness all divisions: Carver, Hopper, Roebling, Newton, and Turing, choose their champions.
Of particular note was the Carver division where Team 254, the Cheesy Poofs from San Jose California were holding court. They were the only team that had gone undefeated up to that point in the season. I want to impress upon the reader that undefeated in a competition where teammates in a trio of robots are randomly assigned for each match in dozens of qualifiers is unheard of.
That alliance, which also included the Robowranglers from Texas and the Spartabots from outside of Seattle breezed through their playoffs to represent Carver on Einstein field, the largest stage of FIRST Robotics.
Now at each level we saw things got crazier and crazier, Einstein was no different. Teams line up for 15 straight matches where each team has minutes between matches to prepare for the next and where only two teams make it through to the grand final.
That grand final is a spectacular event. 20,000 future engineers and scientists loudly celebrating everything that they had accomplished over the prior four months. Building a robot, competing, and winning; and then fighting to get to the Championship, compete again and then enjoy the celebration that is the FRC Championship match and closing ceremonies.
To no-one’s surprise the team including team 254 won the grand final and with the voice of Dean Kamen’s closing address in everyone’s minds we poured 16 exhausted teenagers back onto the bus and to the hotel to get some rest as the dust settled.
Day 5 - Being United
In the last article, chronicling our experiences winning our invite to Houston, there was a moral to the story and this one is no different. We experienced the highest of emotional highs and the lowest of lows in the lead-up to and the time at worlds, but we were always there to exemplify what the Mandela Way means to all of our students including those representing us abroad. At Mandela we need to have strong relationships and to commit to authentic, real-world learning, and being positive citizens of the world.
As we rode the bus back to George Bush international we were standing across the middle accordion of the bus listening to another robotics team speaking a language that no-one could place their finger on. As we got talking to them it came out that they were a team from South Africa who had been competing in the FIRST Tech Challenge Championships at the same time.
And with The Mandela Way in their hearts and minds, our students, future engineers, and citizens of the world did what came naturally to them: they invited them to the game of UNO…
...taught them the rules…
...and rode the bus down Houston’s highway 45 completely missing how incredible it was that robotics teams, one from a school named after Nelson Mandela and one from a country that he helped put back on the world stage, would meet and celebrate Science, Technology, and embodying our hope for the success of the next generation.
...whatever challenges are in front of this group of teenagers in the future, they will be ready for it.
Mitchell Way
Proud Lead Mentor for Team 7277, the United Squadron from Calgary’s Nelson Mandela High School.
