We just got back from the Minneapolis North Star competition, and have a lot to report! We worked with The Robettes, Windchill, and Technocrats on scouting the competition, gathering valuable data. Meanwhile in the pit, the robot’s reliability and rigidity was being continuously improved by battle-testing it during the matches, where our drive team was busy at work generating strategies to counter the opposing alliance! We ranked 12th by alliance selection, and made our way to become the 7th alliance captain during alliance selection! We made it to quarterfinals with our alliance, and to top it off, during the awards ceremony we won the Excellence in Engineering Award!
NoMythic just went to Duluth for the Northern Lights regional competition. A lot happened, and we have some big news to share with you all.
First off, we would like to acknowledge all of the hard work from people in and outside the team. Our deepest gratitude goes out to our build team for designing and building the robot, our programming team for coding it, our ops crew for raising money and resources for it, our mentors for helping us achieve our goal and teaching us valuable lessons along the way, and our sponsors, friends, and families for funding and donating to the team.
Duluth was a long, hard, exhausting, fun, and incredible experience. Everyone on the team worked hard and was absolutely phenomenal at their job. Our pit crew worked each day on maintaining and improving our robot. Our drive team did an amazing job driving the robot each match. Our scouts spent long hours in the hot stands scouting robots to collect accurate data that our strategist used to create a list of teams we would want on our alliance during playoffs. All of our mentors were critical in our work as a team, working with our students to ensure that we had the resources to do our work well, and that we were in a good emotional state to do it. We are so incredibly proud of everyone on our team.
Our robot performed well in our qualification matches, and we were at twelfth rank by alliance selection. We were the alliance captains in an alliance with the Firebears and Full Metal Jackets, and together, we got to the quarterfinals in playoffs.
The awards ceremony was very eventful. Phoebe Kirchner, our team captain, won the well-deserved Dean’s list finalist award! She was recognized for her commitment to creating a welcoming team environment and culture. We are so incredibly proud of her, and we would like to thank her for her incredible amount of work done to the team and its culture.
We are delighted to say that NoMythic will be going to the FIRST robotics world championships in Houston, Texas this year. We were awarded the Engineering Inspiration award, which gives us the opportunity to go to worlds, with our entry fee paid for by NASA.
Though our entry fee is provided, we still have a lot of other things to account for as we prepare for our trip. Transportation, hotels and rooming, and food are all incredibly important things to consider, and all of the aforementioned cost money. All in all, we are expecting the trip will cost us around $15,000.
That’s why we’re asking for your help. Would you be willing to donate to the team to help us achieve our goal of going to worlds this year? Though the road ahead will be an exciting one, it will also be difficult as we work to gain money and supplies for our trip, and you can help us by providing us with money, food, or other in-kind donations. You can donate to us by way of the “donate” tab on our website, or through our GoFundMe set up for this purpose (https://tinyurl.com/NoMythic2491.) No donation is too small or too large, and any amount of support, monetary or otherwise, helps us immensely both in our goal to go to Houston this year and our larger goal to grow future generations of passionate problem solvers.
We are also looking for support from sponsor companies. If you have a potential company that could sponsor us, please don’t hesitate to email me (Joseph) at jsteinhauer@greatriverschool.org, Toby McAdams at tobymcadams@gmail.com, Michael Flood at mflood@greatriverschool.org, or the team email (2491nomythic@gmail.com) with the contact information for a representative of the company.
Again, we would like to thank you for your support of the team and its students, and we’re looking forward to telling you about our journey to world championships!
Us (middle) with our alliance: Full Metal Jackets (left) and the Firebears (right)
We’re in the middle of build season, and we have a Duluth competition coming up pretty soon! Our team has been working a lot to make sure we get to our first official competition of the year and have a lot to get done.
Our operations team has been preparing for Duluth and inventorying everything to make sure we have fun while the building team has been designing and building the robot and the whole team has been participating in big group discussions about where we want the robot to go. The team decided to make both a shooter and climber so part of the build team has been making a climber while the other part makes a shooter.
In addition to our teams working harder we’ve also been meeting more often, with meets three times a week. We also work together during extra practices that are normally just for building or programming, those are usually much smaller and get one or two tasks done. We have held a total of two extra practices which were really useful because we can focus more on specific parts of the robot like the drivetrain.
With the recent rise of the Omicron COVID variant we have been more diligent than ever to make sure we can keep the team safe. Everyone is required to wear specifically KF-94 or KN-95 masks, and we also have optional weekly testing on Tuesdays so that the next Tuesday the team can show proof that no one tests positive, and the team can keep functioning as usual!
NoMythic just had its annual kickoff event, where we launched into build season and learned what we needed to know about the game this year. We decided to split this year’s kickoff into two parts, the first being on Saturday the 8th, and the second on the following Sunday.
We started off the day on Saturday by watching the kickoff video that explained the game. After that, we read over certain parts of the game manual to further understand the rules surrounding the game, field, and building requirements, and how you can score by shooting balls into different hoops or climbing up a set of bars (the higher it climbs, the more points your team gets,) and then met in small groups to talk about traits we would want for this season’s robot. Then, we played a game called the “Robot Paper Game” (or RPG) that allows players to build an imaginary robot that takes part in this season’s game to further understand the rules and what we want (and don’t want) for our robot this season.
On Sunday, we played another game of the RPG, then met as a team to talk about what we learned playing the Robot Paper Game and the strategies we gathered playing it. We then moved on to talking about what we want our robot this season to do, and decided that we want our robot to score high by focusing on climbing.
Back on the 4th of December, NoMythic participated in the Turtle Trials! The Turtle Trials are a mini competition between a few local teams to simulate the competition experience. Five teams competed in the Turtle Trials, with a total a total of seven different robots. It was a refreshing experience for our team, who up until this point, hadn’t attended an in-person competition in months! Here are some notable things from the competition:
We got 5th place
We were allied with one of the Lightning Turtles robots
