Xtreme Bloggin'

New Jersey Regional!

2010-03-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

Although I am a bit late with this post, the New Jersey regional was so great! It was amazing to see all of the hard work our team put into the robot finally pay off. Our team made it to the quarter finals before we were knocked out of the championship rounds, but we put up quite a fight! We met students from other teams and befriended many of them, competitions are always so much fun!
Our next competition is the Philadelphia Region, March 25-27th! We are working hard fixing some small kinks in the robot and adding on new features to hopefully win the whole regional! I guess we'll have to wait and see...

What a crazy two weeks...!

2010-02-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

PHEW! What a hectic past six weeks, but the day has finally come; the shipment day for our new robot! We've all worked so hard for this day, and now...relax. Yeah, Right. Nope, now our team is in full speed preparing for our first competition of the season, the New Jersey Regional (March 5-7), Team 223 has been staying after everyday and we are almost there. :-) This year, our travel team consists of several new freshman members; we are thrilled to bring them along and share our knowledge with them for their upcoming seasons.
In other news, Our website is officially up and running! Team223.com has been around for about a half a year now, but it is all done now. Head of web design, senior Heather T., has been working for a long time with this website, and we are hoping for the web design award this year!
Keep your eyes open, there will be several blogs in preparation for this first competition!

Weeks Three and Four

2010-02-04T06:47:00.000-08:00

Team 223 has been working day and night preparing our robot. Halfway through our six week limit, we are looking good! The team is confident of the robot and we are all so excited to begin our official compeition season.
This past Sunday was the 8th grade open house. As always, team 223 was stylin' and we got at least 35 interested 8th graders! (Could it have been the Taylor Swift playing? Or maybe Mr. Nelson juggling? Personally, I think it was the "Randy Coren" chant!) It was a fun break from the stress of building the robot and everyone seemed to have a great time!
Tonight, Thursday Feb. 4th, the robotics club is having a movie night! We will be showing Transformers in the Lakeland Auditorium at 6:30. We will also be selling popcorn and drinks. Come and support to watch a great movie!

-Kate

Robotics Team Movie Night 2/4

2010-01-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

It's official!!! The Robotics Team is sponsering a movie night on February 4th, in the Lakeland Auditorium! Come and support our team, and enjoy watching Transformers on the big screen. (again!) More details to come soon, and many more movie nights to follow...
Also, the team as been working every day after school, and we will be for the next five weeks! The team has been working hard on starting to cut peices and plan out our robot even more. Graphic Design team is hard to work on making our Imagrey just as great as it has been the past two years running, Business team has been running all over the place trying to raise money for the club and get everything in (some sort of) order, and the build team has been brainstorming every single day, but it will all be worth it soon when we finally send our robot off!

- Kate

And so...Week two begins!

2010-01-18T14:34:00.001-08:00

Week two has started this weekend, and team 223 has not stopped working! The whole team has been staying after school making all the huge decisions, and trying to figure out how we want everything to work. Today, on our day off of school, we headed back to the Robotics room. We tested out many different ideas, and are finally coming to down to having to robot out on paper!
Also, we have a lot of ideas flying around about doing fund raising. As of right now, we have a movie night planned for February 5th (date subject to change) to see Transformers in the Lakeland Auditorium. Come support!
Check back later this week for another update!
Only five more weeks!!!

- Kate

Kickoff 2010!!!

2010-01-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the official start of the FIRST Robotics season of 2010! Our travel team, except a couple of the boys, went to NJIT to watch the unveiling of this year's game, Breakaway, along with a bunch of other FIRST teams. The game this year is a spin off of soccer, so having the varsity soccer coach in charge can really come in handy! You can watch the animation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEHAj3EmpMw.

Afterwords, the team jumped in the car and rushed over to the vex competition to cheer on some of the boys - hitting every red light on the way, of course. Unfortunately, by the time we had finally gotten to Summit High School, our team was already eliminated. Still, we stuck around the competition and cheered on the other teams there. Although Robot Club is not associated with VEX, we still walked away from the competition with a lot more experience and ready to start off our season.

Today, our members all went into the school for long day of decision making and getting work done. For the first hour or two, we just sat around and threw out ideas on the robot, did we want to have a kicker or a bully? a bigger robot, or a smaller one? At the end of the day, we were fully prepared for the next six weeks of building our robot.

Stick around and read the rest of our blogs! We will post a new one at least once a week.

-Kate Bryan.