ACME’s 2017-18 season has been quite an eventful one. In fact, it has been the most successful season in ACME history. Successful not from just a competition standpoint, but from the work the team decided to do at the beginning of the season, and how we accomplished all of it.

At the beginning of the year, the team leads sat down and discussed the goals for this year. There were Hardware team goals and Software teams goals, yes. But they also decided that they wanted to attend Worlds in the Spring. The road to worlds was not an easy one. There were countless sleepless nights and way too much Panda Express, but we somehow persevered.

Qualifiers

Each FTC team is allowed to attend three qualifiers for a chance to win a spot at their state’s championship. Our first qualifier was in Folsom. We did relatively well there, even making it to the finals. We even won first place Think, and second place Inspire at the tournament.

Our second qualifier was in Santa Clara. This is where things were looking really downhill for us. The robot hadn’t been working all day, we were spinning circles around the field. In other words, it was a terrible day in the world of robots. Somehow, we managed to not be put down by our experiences and we managed to stay sort of positive throughout the day. The judges recognized how hard we were trying and kept coming back to our pit to check on us. Although we didn’t think we would get an award, a few team members stayed back anyways. We won first Inspire at Santa Clara. That award scored us a spot at the Northern California Championships.

Even though we had already won an spot at NorCals, we attended our third qualifier anyways. It was good practice for when we would actually be at NorCals. Stark contrast to our last tournament, this qualifier was actually quite good and we had a lot of excellent matches. We made it to the finals as the first seed. For our alliance partner we picked Tech Support, who we ended up winning the qualifier with. To this day, we are still very good friends with their team.

Northern California Regionals

The Northern California Regionals was a really important tournament to excel at because our performance determined the rest of the season. This event lasted two days and was held in Newark, California (Bay Area). Only the best of Northern California attend this event and we were hard pressed to qualify for Supers.

We did really well at NorCals. We were able to be on our division’s first seed alliance and win not only our division, but also come first in both divisions. After that victory, we certainly didn’t expect to receive any awards, but we ended up going home with first place Inspire. This was a huge honor, especially considering how small of a town we are from. Both of our wins qualified us for the Western Super Regionals.

Western Super Regionals

The Western Super Regionals were held in Spokane, Washington, this year. We were really looking forward to the higher level of competition that Supers promised. We spent the weeks after NorCals hurrying to get the robot ready. Unfortunately, our performance at Supers wasn’t as good as we hoped it would be. We were having problems with connectivity (our robot phones were not communicating well), so that meant our robot’s movements were lagging. This issue is out of our control, but it was still frustrating to watch our robot spin from time to time.

Although our performance was not spectacular at that particular time, we managed to earn a spot on the first seed alliance. Although we did not win, the good news was that our robot was working much better as less teams were on the fields. Since we had not qualified through performance, all that was left were award. We were given three awards: first Connect, second Think, and third Inspire. All three of these awards guaranteed us a spot at Worlds.

Houston World Championship

We had finally completed all of our goals! After tireless work we were finally going to Worlds. This was a major moment for our senior members as this was their last chance to go to Worlds. Everyone was very happy that we all had the chance to go.

Houston was unlike any qualifier our championship we had ever been to. It spanned four days, with matches, judging and finals spread across them. All of the FIRST levels were also there, FLL Jr., FLL, FTC, and FRC. Overall, World is a much grander event than any other FIRST championship.

We gained a lot of good experience at Worlds. We preformed well and learned a lot about the game (which is funny, because we had been trying to complete the challenge for the eight previous months). Anyways, even though we didn’t win any awards or make it to the finals we were glad to have had the chance to compete with team all over the World who love FTC just as much as we do.

Overall

Overall, this year has been a year to remember. We competed in all of the tournaments you could qualify for, won Inspire on several occasions (even getting a nice orange Inspire banner!!), and gained more experience and knowledge to be used next year.

We are hoping to get back to Worlds next season and maybe even win an award or make it to the finals. For now, we have a lot of planning to do over the summer to prep us for the next FIRST Tech Challenge.