Hey, sorry we have been inactive for a while but we have been really busy!
Over the last two days we have participated in the Uk national championships. Four teams attended from our school (East Barnet.)
The competition started well for us, we went 9-0 in qualifying and were seeded #1. We allied with 4458A, Barrow Hall college and 5194A vex impact.
The knock out went well, except a scare when our cortex stopped working in the semi final. We ended up facing 3116c, 5194B and 5194D in the final. Two very close games followed but we just about managed to sneak it. We also picked up the design award!
The competition was a great two days and we would like to say a big thank you to Vex for organising the event and The John Warner school who as usual had some amazing robots. The event couldn’t have gone much better for our school as we picked up 7 trophies.
Thanks and yes we will be coming to worlds if we can raise the funds. There are 6 teams who have qualified from the UK this year:
5194 - UK National Champions and London Regional Excellence Award
4458A - UK National Champions
5194A - UK National Champions
5035A - UK National Excellence Award
3116C - Bristol Regional Excellence Award
46644 - Midlands Regional Excellence Award
Now we are qualified for worlds, we are wondering if we need to change our robot. Can we have your guys honest opinions on whether or not our current robot will receive a thrashing?
Also, if we are going to do a re-build, is it worth buying pneumatics and if so which design.
Your current robot looks pretty good. Reliable score/descore, ect. Honestly it won’t win worlds though. I somewhat doubt it would be picked for the elimination matches, so if you really want to get that far I would recommend rebuilding.
However, if your goal is to meet some new people, have fun, and play some good matches, you would not necessarily need to rebuild. Your current robot is good enough that I would estimate you would win about half of your matches, more or less depending on your partners and opponents, which is by no means a “thrashing” at the World Championship.
Also realize that you do not have much time left. One month (not including travel) is a very short time to build, program, and practice with an entirely different robot. It may be more beneficial to get more practice in with the current one. Only rebuild if you have your heart set on getting into the elimination matches, and you are confident in your abilities and willing spend the spend the time to build a whole new robot.
Our team is a MS team but we were in a few tournaments that combined MS and HS this year and your style of robot (wrist-action scooper) dominated both those tournaments and at one of them set the WR for programming skills at the time (175).
I don’t think I would spend a lot of time on your overall design - but instead I would invest a lot of time in perfecting the programming and practicing the driving to make the bot as absolutely smooth and precise as possible. Make sure to perfect de-scoring as well and you can do well with that bot.
Getting selected for finals takes so many different variables - with the time you have left I would recommend to my team to invest all their time to perfecting the design they qualified with.
Whatever your choice good luck and hope to see you guys at World’s!
