Today I am working with the Metamora robotics team. Robotics was something I was involved in during high school so when I graduated I came back as a mentor for the team. This year’s game involves throwing an exercise ball into a goal for points. Primarily I help out with the actual building of the robot as opposed to the programming, or modeling of it. Basically if it needs to be welded together I get to help the students with it. Unfortunately since I’m not a student anymore I don’t get the perk of being able to leave school to travel to the regional to watch the robot compete. Luckily one of the regional competitions is in Pekin this year so I can just drive to it. Sadly I won’t the fun regional inn Wisconsin so I guess this year I’ll have to watch it online since all the competitions get steamed live on the internet.

This year I’m not too sure how the team will do. The first year no one had high expectations and the team did amazing. We made it all the way to the final competition and ended up in eighth out of the entire world. Last year everyone was too ambitious and we barley had a robot done in time. We competed in two regionals that year and lost them both. The first one we were still figuring out how to control the robot, and the second one the robot decided to start falling apart. So there’s no real way of telling how this year will go.