Our team, 66994B Unicorn Puncher, was lucky enough to bring the top 3 awards home: The Excellence Award, Tournament Champion Award, and the Skills Champion Award. This was a fun and enjoyable journey.
For the skills challenge, we actually practiced for around 2 weeks prior to the competition.
The autonomous skills code was mainly written by me, and I made sure it was as consistent as possible. Our first attempt scored us 60 points. The second and third autonomous attempts didn't go nearly as well due to problems with our intake system.
For driving skills, we have a bigger margin of error since we can control the robot. Though sometimes control zones can be tough to get. But finally, driven by my sister Jin, we ended up with a nice 84 points.
Our match schedule for qualification matches was extremely good. We were paired with our sister team, 66994T, once, and paired with 78181A, one of the top teams, twice. Unfortunately, though, we didn't manage to get the AWPs on these 3 matches because we had problems scoring into the lower center goal.
Overall, we won all but one match and got 1 AWP. This ranked us first in the qualification ranking. There are lots of great teams in this competition, but we chose our sister team, 66994T, as our elimination alliance partner because we have had experience working together.
Our first challenge was during the semifinals. We had 66994D, our other sister team, and 1791V, a very consistent-performing team, as our opponents. They did a great job using side wings to de-score our blocks. Luckily, we managed to swing the match back after intense battling around the long goals.
We fought a best-of-3 series of matches for the final matches. Our opponents were 17022A and 78181A. The matches were very competitive and had us stressed. We ended up winning 2 matches in a row. Our strategy was to defend and hold onto the long goals after securing the advantage in the autonomous period.
However, performing well isn't the only criterion for the Excellence Award. Teams also have to perform well on the Engineering Notebook and the Team Interview. Luckily, we have prepared for the notebook since the start of the season, and we have practiced the interview to clearly demonstrate our design processes, robot, programming, strategies, and team management. Finally, we are honored to receive the Excellence Award for this year's TAI-VEX.
We have found a few problems with our robot. So we might either improve our robot or make an entirely new robot.
The next competition for us is the PAS-VEX Signature Event in December, which has 3 spots for the World Championship. So we should prepare hard and aim for the awards.
From the start of the season, I have learned a lot from VEX, including programming concepts, strategic thinking, and communication. I'm also very excited about the future competitions and the great teams and robots from everyone.
