I am a world champion!

It was unbelievable, dramatic, exciting, intense.

After months of preparation, designing, building, organizing, funding, and so on and so forth we competed in the International FIRST Tech Challenge. 1,000 Teams registered for with FTC this year, 100 made it to the international competition with us. Arguable, some of them were better designed, most notably a team of home schooled engineers called Power Surge who made videos and designed their robot to achieve an incomparable amount of scoring. They went undefeated, that is until they went against us in the elimination round.

Pinning isn't allowed so we had to simply position our robot between the center scoring facility and the Power Surge robot. It's a two minute game, we scored in the first minute and from then on we had to keep Power Surge away. It was best 2/3 and who ever would win would move on to the finals. After the longest minute of my life, persistence by the Power Surge Robot and a very close call, we won, Power Surge just wasn't able to score.

At the finals, two alliances of three robots compete. Our robot had the high score going into the elimination round so we got to choose our alliance members but we were the superior robot, we were the high scorer. At least in theory. During the finals, our autonomous mode failed to work properly so we gave it up to our two alliance members. Their robots competed with out us after we lost the first of the three final matches. But we kept the hope up and we won match number two. Then they fought hard and won the last match. We were all world champions.

What a day.

Constructive criticism is always appreciated.