This past weekend, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regionals in San Jose, CA. Our goal was to qualify for the World Championship. After a long two days of judging, matches, and scouting, we were able to do just that. 

The Northern California Regionals span two days. 56 teams from the Northern California League, which spans from Bakersfield to the California – Oregon border, compete for eight spots of advancement to Worlds. These eight winners are the winning alliance (consisting of three teams), then 2nd place alliance captain, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Inspire winners, and finally the Think award winner. That meant that we had to place high enough during the competition, or try to win Inspire or Think in order to qualify for the World Championship.

Judging and inspection began on Saturday and then match play on Sunday. Our judging presentation was at 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday. Our judging presentation went very well! Then, we went and set up our pit area and took the robot to inspection (which we passed). 

Sunday started bright and early with opening ceremonies and qualification matches. ACME played matches throughout the day and won 3 out 5 of them, placing us at 15th out of 28 teams in our division. During alliance selection we were picked to be on the third seed alliance. 

During elimination rounds we made it to our division finals. This meant we were playing against the first seed alliance. They ultimately beat us, but it was very fun to compete in the finals.

Since we had not qualified through match play, we need to win one of the awards I mentioned above. As each award passed, we became more and more discouraged as we hadn’t been nominated for any. Then they announced the Think winner – and it was ACME Robotics!

We were so excited and ran down the bleachers to high-five all of the tournament officials, referees, and judges. The Think award winner had a guaranteed spot at the World Championship and we couldn’t believe we had received it!

The Think award is given for a team’s engineering notebook. You may not know this, but we have to document our design process throughout the year in the engineering notebook. We use a typesetting system called LaTeX (pronounced la-tech) that allows us to  professionally format our engineering notebook. Throughout the notebook, we have entries written by every member on our team about our design process, fabricating parts, testing code, putting on outreach events, and everything in between. We include drawings, diagrams, pictures, and code into our notebook so that everything has a good visual representation. 

We were so honored to have been given the Think award and are already planning our pit for the World Championship. Worlds is held in Houston, Texas, and will be a week long affair from the 17-20 of April. In order to fund our way to Worlds we have set up a GoFundMe page where anyone can sponsor us. Here is the link: https://www.gofundme.com/acme-robotics-season-funding

Also, please click here if you would like to know how we did at Worlds last year and learn a little bit about it. 

As always, 

GO ACME!