The Houston FTC World Championship was our 5th and final competition this season. Our team traveled to Houston, Texas to compete against teams from all over the world. We competed and allianced with teams from location ranging from California to China to Lebanon. We had a great time visiting all of the teams’ pit areas and getting to know so many different people from various backgrounds. During our first match, we were able to get an 85 point autonomous, but we weren’t able to complete a cipher. We struggled during the next two matches and decided to change drivers because we felt that one of them was having more difficulty performing under stress. Once we switched drivers, we won all but one of our matches. We were able to score 85 points during the autonomous period consistently. Our fastest cipher time was 47 seconds, and we almost filled two cryptoboxes. Unfortunately, we were not picked during alliance selection, so the qualification matches were the only matches that we were able to play. Although we felt we could have performed better during our matches, we were still happy that we got to test our newly built robot. We got the chance to improve our autonomous greatly, and more people got driving experience. We are looking forward to participating at the Maker Faire in May, and we hope to perform more consistently there. Overall, the FTC World Championship was a great experience for our team. We met people from all over the world, traveled and toured a city that most of us had never been to, and became closer as a team. We had a great time driving our newly built robot and making improvements to it as the competition went on. Although we were not as successful as we had hoped, this competition was an exciting learning experience for everyone. In the weeks leading up to the Maker Faire, we plan to improve the consistency our multi-glyph autonomous, fix our relic mechanism, and prepare for the next season. We are hoping to schedule some dates for library presentations where we discuss our team and the recruitment process. We also hope to continue sharing our experience with FIRST to the community through workshops and other community events.
Our game strategy during this competition was to score 85 points during the autonomous period and complete a cipher. We were able to score 85 points during auto pretty consistently. We were almost successful at scoring an extra glyph during autonomous, so we hope to improve this for our next competition. We were successful at completing a cipher several times, so we are now trying to shave off time in doing this. Our relic mechanism was not functioning at this competition, so our goal during endgame was to help our alliance partner fill their cryptobox and balance on the balancing stone.