Spring Break Update

Hi Mom and Lee

Hope all is well in Michigan!  It is my spring break, but sadly this post is still being done from my office.  Last Thursday-Saturday Jeremy and I went to the FIRST competition with the high school robotics team that we volunteer for.  It was great!  It was also very  very hard work.  All schools get exactly 6 weeks to build their robots then they have to ship them to the competition site.  On Thursday at 8am we could unbox our robot and do final testing/building/programming - until 8pm when the pits close (they call the work area the pit like in NASCAR, only nerdier).   Our robot still had a lot of last minute work that needed to be done, so we were working pretty much the whole day.  We were only scheduled for 5 or 6 practice slots on the official field, so we didn't get all of the kinks worked out before the competition started.  The competition is on Friday and Saturday.  Both days the pits open at 8 and the competition starts around 9:30.  Pretty much you work on the robot all of the time when it isn't competing to fix things that didn't work/broke/never worked.  It was pretty intense. When I get the pictures off the camera I will post a few.

The way the competition works, the students compete in alliances with two other robots and then everybody gets ranked at the end of pool play at lunch on Saturday.  After that the top eight teams become the team captains for the playoff teams.  They each draft two other teams to be in their alliance for the playoffs.  Our kids finished ranked 18th or so (out of over 50 teams) but ended up not getting drafted for the playoffs. The teams that do really well early on start scouting other teams on Friday and since our robot didn't start doing really well until Saturday, we think that we got passed over by most of the scouting teams.  The kids were disappointed, but still had a great time overall.  I think it helped that our very last round of pool play was almost perfect.  There is another competition in two weeks, that Jeremy will be going to (I have class so I'll have to stay home) so hopefully our team will do even better at that one. 

We've been volunteering a lot with the robot team (all day on Saturdays and all afternoon/evening on Fridays) so now that the competition season is almost over, we'll have to find some other way to spend all of our time :)  I may actually have to do some of my grading!

In April I am going to Las Vegas!  Of course, I am going to attend a workshop on accreditation for computer science programs, so that is a little less exciting than what most people go to Vegas for.

Other than that, no real news from California. Happy Spring!