Robots

My kids are mad about their robotics team. They’re both a part of this amazing, volunteer-led club at high school, and they spend about as much time in shop, building a robot every year as they do at school. So I finally went to one of the competitions they took part in this year in Monterey, California, to see what it was all about.

Here is the “pit” where the robot returns to between 3-minute long matches. It’s where quick fixes and last-minute adjustments happen before it heads back to another match.

Below is a mid-game capture. I’d explain what’s going on, but I suspect it’s the kind of thing that’s only interesting to the participants and (maybe) their parents.

A quick waiting-in-the-wings sketch of teams queueing up for their match.

And one last sketch from @firstrobotics, Monterey Bay regionals. This is just a small subset of volunteers at the event. Judges, referees, queuers, and more all volunteer their time. It took 76 volunteers to hold an event with 36 teams (and that’s not counting all the mentors that volunteer with each team!)
It makes my head spin to think of how many volunteers it takes to run the Worlds Championships in Houston, which was a couple of weeks after this event and had 800 teams competing!