21 February, 2009 in Robotics, School by Aonghas

A Vexing Final

I had to sacrifice a morning to sleep in today because I had to go with Calum to help teach his recorder classes. Since he’s still recovering from his jaw operation, he couldn’t play the recorder so he used me to play the recorder for him while he taught his classes. Today was the first day of classes for the year, so there were some new faces in the beginner classes. I saw a pretty clever feature on the photocopying machine when I popped out for a little while to do some photocopying for Calum. There were three sheets that Calum wanted me to get copies of, so when I loaded the top tray with the three pages, the machine automatically pulled each page in one at a time to scan and copy, but I noticed the side tray was moving back and forth where the copies come out. I didn’t realise till afterwards that the side tray was actually moving across when each set of three pages had finished printing, so that each set of sheets were already separated. I thought that was pretty clever!

We got home from teaching at around 11 o’clock and I had to get ready to go to the Vex Robotics competition at Avondale College. When I arrived at Avondale, our team had already played one of their matches and they lost unfortunately. We managed to rectify that loss with a few more wins subsequently, which helped our ranking climb a bit.

From left: Meiyen Toh, Kayla Craig, Aonghas Anderson, Chelsea Robinson, Crystal Chan, Caleb Van Beynen

I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with the Westlake girls during the day, since I hadn’t seen them for quite a while. Their teacher approached me after seeing me with my camera and asked if I could take some photographs of their team for their school newsletter, so I tried to get some good shots of their robot in action as well as their team members during the day. After all the round robin matches had been played, the top-ranking teams were announced, and each of them chose another team to be in their alliance going into the semi-finals and the final rounds. Although we weren’t one of the top four teams, we were chosen by Onehunga High School to play with them in an alliance. The semi-final matches were played (they were just single matches) and the Rutherford/Onehunga alliance managed to come away with a win to make the finals. Unfortunately for the Westlake Girls’ alliance, they were knocked out in the semi-finals.

The finals match at the weekend's Competition

Heading into the final round, Rutherford and Onehunga were up against Glenfield and another school (which I’ve forgotten). It was best of three matches. The first match was easily won by the Rutherford/Onehunga alliance, however the second match was won by the opposing alliance. I think their loss in the second match was partly due to the fact that Rutherford’s robot had a parts malfunction when the conveyor belt detached. The score was 1-1 and it came down to the last match to decide the winners. After another gruelling match, it was hard to say who had won by a brief inspection. The result was… a DRAW! That meant the Decider match had to be replayed. We were in for a nail-biting final!

The last match wasn’t as close as the second to last match, and in the end the red alliance won the competition (Rutherford/Onehunga were the blue alliance). It was an unfortunate end result but I think we can definitely build on this experience and I’m sure the Rutherford Atomic Kiwis will be back to put up another challenging fight at next week’s competition.

I’ll add more photos from the day when I fix up my gallery. Shouldn’t be too much longer to go now…

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