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Happy Halloween from the Tin Mints! We hope everyone has a great Halloween this year! And we’ll see you tomorrow at Ramp Riot! (Also, this photo is from the Trunk or Treat we did last Saturday after Girl Power.)

We competed at Girl Power this weekend for the second year in a row. We had some trouble with our shooter because there were problems with our gearbox after being used all season. Despite this, our autonomous worked especially well, and when we weren’t working on the shooter, which was all but two matches, we were able to truss the ball. Our final record was 6-1, and we were the top-ranked alliance captain! We chose teams 222, 4637, and 3974, and because there were only fourteen teams at the event, we went straight to semi-finals. We moved onto finals in two matches. Finals, however, was tough. After losing our first match, we were determined to win the next one to stay in, but somehow our robot turned itself off, or another team did by accident, so we were dead halfway through the match. Even though there were some difficulties, it was an exciting day.

We competed at Duel on the Delaware, hosted by MOE and the Lunatecs, this past weekend in Carney’s Point, NJ. Rosie did great during the matches- her autonomous was beautiful. Our record after the Qualification Matches was 3-2. Although our rank was 10th, we were not chosen for alliance selection, but we were glad that we were the first backup robot. Congrats to the winning teams!

Last weekend we participated in the Battle O’ Baltimore. Rosie did very well- she completed her autonomous mode of moving forward and shooting into the high goal 100% of the time! We are improving on scouting; some girls and parents volunteered to scout for this event.
We made it to the quarter-finals, but unfortunately lost. The winners of the competition were teams 2537, 1885, 4945, and 422, and the runners-up were teams 836, 2528, 357, and 533. Great job to all the teams who participated!

This past Saturday we had the oppurtunity to go to the Ridley Park Victorian Fair. We demonstrated Rosie, sold a lot of brushel brushes and T-shirts, and talked about our team to everyone who walked by. We even sold a few flocks of flamingos, which is turning out to be a great fundraiser! There were several people who were very interested in our team and our accomplishments, and we even encouraged a few girls to try robotics out! All the girls and parents did a great job promoting our team and helping to run our table.

Last week we had a party where we made flamingos. We outlined, cut, and painted the flamingos, and they turned out even better than we hoped. We plan to use these flamingos as a fundraiser that we call “flocking.” Flocking is when you place flamingos on the lawns of family and friends and leave a note explaining that they must pay a certain amount to get the flamingos removed from their front yard or to have them placed on another person’s yard. We are hopeful that this fundraiser will be successful, and we look forward to flocking our first house!

We are so excited for the new challenge this year, titled “World Class Learning Unleashed.” Watch the teaser here:
http://www.firstlegoleague.org/challenge/2014fllworldclass

In honor of this season’s challenge, Jr. FLL created a desk and chair using LEGOs…

And FLL made a list of “what would make school better.”

The official release date for World Class is August 26th. We’re thinking that there will be plenty of color sensors for the girls to program!

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).