Author: Tin Mints

On Saturday, May 3, we held a STEM workshop for younger Girl Scouts. They learned about all levels of FIRST, especially FLL. They learned how to build and program an NXT robot using Mindstorms, played fun games, and built a “brushel bot,” made out of floor scrubbers and vibrating toothbrushes. They had a lot of fun making the brushel bots, especially because they got to decorate them! We also demonstrated our robots from the past two seasons, Rosie and Rosie 2. The girls, and their moms, were in awe of both robots, and loved seeing our first Rosie shooting frisbees. They took home the GSEP FIRST Robotics Patrol STEM patch to place on the back of their vests.

Miss Laurel talking about FIRST

Building NXT robots

We would just like to congratulate every team that is moving on to the Championships in St. Louis, which include but are not limited to:
-Teams 2590, 11, and 341, the winners of the overall competition
-Teams 1218 and 303, the Chairman’s Award winners
-Teams 25 and 1676, our Engineering Inspiration competition
-And all the other teams moving on.

The Tin Mints thoroughly enjoyed this past weekend. On Friday, we had our EI interview, and we feel like we did our best. Saturday was quite eventful, what with the alliance selection and elimation rounds. A few Girl Scouts came to see us, which was so exciting! Since we did not bring our robot with us, we showed the girls some other teams’ robots, including Team 357, who was our mentor team during our rookie season last year. The girls were able to see some of the matches up close, and they thought it was so cool! Also, as an aside, I would like to shoutout to the kid from Team 4954 taking selfies with all the teams. It was a pretty cool idea.

Good luck to the teams competing at Lehigh University for the MAR Championships today. We’ll see you later when we get interviewed for EI this evening (or we are already there, depending on the person).

Exactly one year ago, we were on the FOX 29 morning news to promote our team and the MAR Championships. Notice our nervousness/awkwardness?

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/video?clipId=8760436&autostart=true

We are so excited to go camping this weekend with our Jr. FLL and FLL girls, as well as other Girl Scouts, at Camp Laughing Waters. We think it is very important to do activities with our younger girls, and we have made so many friends because of these connections through robotics.

I thought I would do a Throwback Thursday picture today. Here’s a photo of the Smart Cookies from our first competitive year for FLL, way back in the day (just kidding, it’s from 2012). Ahh, programming an NXT robot, learning about and coming up with a solution to a real world problem, and teaching others about Core Values. Those were the days…

All 54 teams are registered for MAR, and we are not one of them. However, we are completely fine with this, and we are excited to go to MAR for Engineering Inspiration, even though we will not be competing. What can I say? We’re so excited, and we just can’t hide it. Good luck to the other teams and we will see you there.

The Tin Mints have been anxiously awaiting the final list for the teams qualified for MAR (Mid-Atlantic Robotics) champs at Lehigh University. And after much consideration…we still do not know, but we are hoping to know by tomorrow. If we do qualify (fingers crossed!), we would be excited and honored to compete against the other teams. Even if we do not get the opportunity to compete at MAR, we are hoping to receive the Engineering Inspiration Award to get us to St. Louis!

Here’s the link for MAR’s Website:
http://www.midatlanticrobotics.com

Our reception of the Engineering Inspiration Award. My apologies for the squealing. 

This past weekend, we competed at Seneca High School in Tabernacle, New Jersey. There were 39 other teams in attendance. We started off surprisingly well, and our rank fluctuated here and there. Once the qualification matches ended, we were ranked 11th, which was a lot better than last week’s rank of 25th. During alliance selection, we moved down to the 8th alliance captain due to other alliances picking teams in the top 8. We formed an alliance with teams 2729 and 709. We made it to the quarterfinals, but lost to teams 2590, 223, and 1640.
Like last weekend, we presented for Chairman’s again. Although we did not receive this award (Nemesis did), we were excited when they called our name for the Engineering Inspiration award! Looks like we might have a shot of going to World’s this year.