On March 29‐31 at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, Mechanical Mayhem enthusiastically competed in the UNH District Event with our robot, Anonymous Grandparent.
Although the first day had a rough beginning with two losses in our first five matches, Mechanical Mayhem did not get discouraged and kept persevering with our well‐designed and carefully built robot which shone through as one of the best at the competition. In fact, we did not lose another match throughout the rest of the tournament! At the end of the qualification matches, Mayhem ranked fourth out of all 42 teams.
During alliance selection for the playoff matches on Saturday, the top ranked team 319 Big Bad Bob invited Mechanical Mayhem to join their alliance, and we were thrilled when team 4555 Sprocketology was still available later in alliance selection to be chosen as the third robot on our alliance.
The 319‐1519‐4555 alliance worked well together, with 319 and 1519 dominating the Scale in the center of the field and maintaining ownership throughout the match. Meanwhile 4555 did well feeding Power Cubes through the Exchange to gain the alliance various Power Up advantages, often getting 9 cubes in the Vault to fully activate all the Power Ups. This strong alliance stormed through the playoff matches without a loss, handily winning the UNH District Event.
During the Awards Ceremony, Mechanical Mayhem was ecstatic to also receive the Excellence in Engineering Award sponsored by Delphi. The announcer read out the judges’ comments: “This robot truly exemplified excellence in engineering. Their robot included automated manipulation of cubes even in autonomous mode. There was a minimum amount of movement required to place cubes, and multiple tasks could be performed at the same time. This assured that their robot and team were competitive on the field and across the board.”
Other highlights of the event included Mayhem student Carson singing the National Anthem for Opening Ceremonies on Saturday morning, and Mayhem student Gabriel explaining his vision to Dean Kamen for making artificial intelligence available to all teams, so they can train the robot to automatically detect and acquire game pieces, like our team did this year. Our Dean’s List nominees, Gabriel and Faith, were recognized at opening ceremonies along with the nominees from other participating teams. We are cheering on our coach and founding mentor Bill Gray as he is considered for the Woodie Flowers Award at the New England District Championship!
Thank you to all our sponsors for enabling us to compete in FIRST! We hope to represent you well at the New England District Championship at Boston University on April 11‐14!
