Today was a whirlwind of activity as teams from around the world came together in Houston.  Of the 108 teams who are at Worlds, 50% are from the US and 50% are from other countries.  The convention center is an enormous venue.  Day 1's main task was to get the team in one place to build our team PIT in the Lego League space.  We got a lot of support from WI FRC teams because our PIT  materials first had to get there, then get "sprung" from the FRC area to us - harder than it looks!  Huge thanks to 2202 (BEAST) for getting our pit and project stuff to Houston and 930 (Mukwanago Bears) and 2194 (Fondy Fire) for offering to grab them from the BEAST pit for us.  

Wow - what a day!  Today was Robot Practice day and our team showed amazing resilience!  After some great runs at the in-pit practice table, our robot "bricked" on the first official practice run of the day and we found out we violated one of the Worlds rules (that was not a violation in WI).  Yikes!  Thankfully the team rallied and started brainstorming what they could do with official practice run 2.  Their strategy worked!  Run 2 yielded the team 315/410 points.  They did even better on the 3rd round and matched season high (in competition) 345 points!  Hooray!  After that, we ate lunch, practiced scripts for Day 3, and  cheered on 2 WI FRC teams - 2202 (BEAST) and 2506 (Saber Robotics).  Both won the matches we watched - hooray!

Today was an endurance test - the kids ran 3 robot competition matches throughout the morning, then do a presentation at 3PM.  Robot performed consistent with our highest season scores in WI - 325, 345, and 335.  At the end of the day, their score placed 45th in the World in Robot game!  After lunch, we  got back to practicing for presentations.  Kids had some suckers to wake up their bodies and played "the alphabet game" to wake up their minds.  They did  their absolute best in the judging room and represented our state well!  Tonight we had pizza, took a picture with all the WI teams who attended the event, and went swimming to celebrate!

Another early start, this time for the encore robot game!  It was a pressure test, where a challenge was revealed at 8, then needed to be played with an alliance team (Honduras) at 930.  The alliance teams were only allowed 2 10-minute sessions at the table to test and modify code.  With none of our typical tools available, we used the WI state flag to measure from home base to where the tokens needed to go so we could test our token shooting mechanism at our pit.  It worked brilliantly!  At awards, we didn't bring home a trophy;  however, a judge from our presentation room came to deliver a Woodie Flowers Gracious Professionalism token to the team during the day (<5 teams were recognized in this way).  All in all it was an amazing experience for kids (and coaches!)!!