On January 5th 2018 we had our second qualifier of the season, which was located at Hinds Community College in Pearl, MS. The competition included many other teams such as “Challenge Accepted” and “Team Tungsten.” It was a pleasure competing with all of these other great teams.

Our team captain, Brandon, said, “I’m pretty happy with how this qualifier went. The programmers were still rushed in trying to make code work in autonomous, but it didn’t last all day like at other competitions. Our judging sessions have greatly improved. The robot was actually able to perform well over the course of the day even if we weren’t the winning alliance.” The performance of our robot has gone from not moving at the second qualifier of the last season, to being in the top two teams at the end of the normal matches this time around.

One of our programmers and statisticians, Gray, said “I was happy with the qualifier for the most part. I thought, even though we did not qualify for state, we could have if things had gone a bit different. The only thing the robot could not do was get four inches off the ground at the start of the match.” In the FTC Rover Ruckus game, you have to hang from the lander and be at least 4 Inches off of the ground. If you are able to hang four inches off of the ground at the start of the match and then lower yourself to the floor you can score thirty points. Gray continues by saying, “I thought that we were also shown that we were close by us being second when it came time to pick an alliance partner. I also think our biggest problem was that we just ran out of time which was shown in the fact that we lost one of our semi finals match by 60+ points. So I think if we had just one or two more weeks to test we could have not only qualified, but won.”

Although we didn’t end up advancing to the next round of the competition which is the Mississippi FTC State Championships, we did improve our scores from both last year and our first qualifier. We won second place for the Connect award and came home with a new trophy that we have never won before, the Motivate Award for making a collective effort to make FIRST known throughout their school and community, and sparks others to embrace the culture of FIRST. As always there is a lot of learning and appreciation that we take away from competitions, not just trophies. So in short, the competition was a success and we congratulate our competitors who are advancing to the Mississippi FTC State Championships!