St. Joseph District Competition

Las Pumas sailed head-long into the district competition at Penn High School. We arrived on Friday with a skeleton crew to load and unload the trailer and bot after school and where there until nearly 10:00 p.m. working.

The next day the whole team met at the school at 6:00 a.m. to load up and set sail to take the down the competition. Once we arrived at the event it was non-stop action for the team, weather it was cheering on our amazing drive team or fixing problems with the bot. Saturday was totally filled with qualifier rounds to get to the finals on Sunday. The team sailed straight through the rough seas at the beginning of the day but went on smooth sailing throughout the rest of the day. After the competition had come to a close the team went out to eat, had some laughs, and grew stronger, not just at a team level, but on a personal one.

Sunday we returned to the competition, leaving the school again at 6:00 a.m. after a very late night of bonding and hard work, once we got back to Penn we had a few more matches until alliance selection at lunch. Right before lunch we were picked in the second round by teams 2771 and 4982. After a hard-fought few matches our alliance was knocked out after two ties, in the third tiebreaker match, but we would not go home empty handed. Team 2197 came back with a vengeance when it came to the other awards offered to the competitors to the competition. We received two (Engineering Inspiration, Safety) of the four awards we entered to win, (Imagery, Engineering Inspiration, Entrepreneurship, Safety) since we cant win both Engineering Inspiration and Entrepreneurship at one competition, we won Engineering Inspiration for our work in the community and involvement in training and inspiring the next generation of engineers through robotics. With the tremendous help of our safety captain Hannah Nelson we were also able to bring home the District Safety Award.

All in all a very successful competition for the 2197 Las Pumas robotics team, we didn't win with our bot, but still brought home two very prestigious awards and had a great time doing so!