Extra-Curriculars

In February 2022, my friends and I took part in a Battle Bots tournament called "Sacramento Bot Battles." We had only two months to test and build a respectable bot, a considerably short amount of time. Everyone in our team was inexperienced and adding to the factor that we were short on time, we had to cram in a lot of work. We first began by formatting the design we wanted to achieve and split our roles in the team. We did a lot of research and looked up a lot of tutorials to understand the functionality of the bot to meet the rules of the competition. However, even with many afterschool hours put in we were not able to have a metal chassis for the bot due to time constraints. Our final design was a 3D printed chassis, with additional metal bits and a metal wedge, and the bot was named "HaleStorm," after our beloved coding and robotics teacher. We went with what we had, hoping that we could at least gain a learning experience. Unfortunately, our first round didn't go as well as we had hoped. We lost, and the edges of our bot's chassis became loose, which resulted in the inside parts of our bot being thrown out. Our bot was demolished, however, we voted that we should try to assemble what we could to compete in the next round.  As a team, we worked quickly to reassemble the bot, and I feel that this was the most valuable part of our trip, as we gained experience on how to deal with and recover from a losing situation. Our result was "HaleStorm 2.0." Even though we lost again, our bot did much better in the second round than it did in the first, therefore I was happy with our overall experience at the tournament. We look forward to the next Battle Bots competition, with a better overall Battle Bot, and recruitment of more members.