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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.

Tonight we did some last minute adjustments on our robot. We are very excited to compete at Lenape this weekend, and we are ready for Chairman’s! And, we are excited to say that we have a pit crew this competition, which was basically nonexistant in previous competitions.
We would like to thank the LuNaTeCs who were kind enough to allow us to come to their shop yesterday and work on our robot. They were a big help to us.

Over the weekend, we competed at Springside-Chestnut Hill with 34 other FRC teams. We discovered that there were problems with Rosie 2.0, specifically in the connection between the battery and the breaker. Although we did not advance into the elimination rounds, we made some adjustments on our robot, and we are currently tweaking it so that it will do better at Lenape this weekend.
Our Chairman’s presentation went surprisingly well even though we did not win this award. We are very proud nonetheless, and we are looking forward to present for Chairman’s this weekend. We are all also extremely proud of Erin, who got on the Dean’s List and will be advancing to MAR. We celebrated by getting frozen yogurt, and Patrice even taught us how to do the Nay-Nay dance.

Tomorrow kicks off Week 3 at Springside-Chestnut Hill. Since this was our first competition last year as rookies, we have high expectations of doing well. It took the full six weeks of building season to work on our robot for this year’s challenge, Aerial Assist. What a different game this year compared to last year’s challenge, Ultimate Ascent.
We are excited for our Chairman’s presentation tomorrow, but we are very nervous! However, tomorrow will be quite an exciting day with the Qualification Rounds. We’re looking forward to seeing other teams’ robots this year, including the rookie teams! The STEM Mobile will be making an appearance…