8059 Blank. has just hosted the 2nd edition of Blank.'s Beginning 2025 on 4 June 2025.
Should still be early enough to be considered as the first Push-Back organised event.
And once again, it was a great success - not so much in terms of quality of matches or robots, but because it kickstarted the teams, and gave us an opportunity to test out the game rules (in a competition setting), test out some design ideas and gameplays.
Some facts about the event:
After some last minute pulling out, we had 14 teams from 8 schools
Each team played 8 qualifying matches, with 2 fields setup, about 10min match cycle (I know… it is very generous). Event lasted from 11am (1st match) till about 4.30pm, including a one-hour lunch break.
2 pushbots, 1 hoarder, and the rest mainly different variation of roller intakes and chain uptake.
Do also bear in mind that the new field elements only arrived in SG schools on 29 or 30 May - this means all the robots were practically Ri3D or lesser.
Built quality definitely suffered and most teams didn’t had time to do an autonomous as well. So please be kind and understanding to the teams.
As the event was so early, TM is not ready for the new season yet - hence we couldn’t factor in AWP (might as well… since no teams have time for a proper autonomous).
For record - 1st seed (8076D and 8059A) won the event
Some findings/observations:
Resetting of fields are fast - just make sure you have a short pole with you (to push the cubes out of the long goals)
Surprisingly - the plastic goals are more lasting that we thought it will be. Scratches, but no cracks found after the event.
Side-rollers rules (my personal opinion)
It is actually not easy to score or intake from the loaders when defense is played against the robot.
The game rules are pretty fine as it is.
I will leave the rest of the analysis to you.
Here’s the finals…
And I believe my students will be doing their robot reveals soon…
I look forward to reading about Blank’s Beginnings every year! It’s always cool to see the game getting played in the wild in some organized fashion for one of the first times.
Thanks for writing about some of your takeaways! Glad to hear it went well, again
I noticed something pretty cool during one of the games. blue was unable to park because the parking area was completely filled with balls. if a bot strategically fills the other team’s parking zone with balls beforehand, that can ensure that the other team does not get to park. the only slight problem with this is that if a bot pushes out the balls, the whole thing will be pointless, but as long as that doesn’t happen i think this is a great antiparking method(unless if the opposing team just drives on top of the balls ofc)
It is one of our discussed strategies.
Like you mentioned, most likely the opponents should still be able to clear the blocks (I still don’t like to use blocks… not intuitive) away, but it is about making things difficult for them and make them waste a few more seconds on the clearance.
Nobody notice that simple and yet useful gadget on 8059F?
