On January 14th, Trial and Error Robotics participated in our second qualifier of the season hosted by FTC Team #6273 Technocats in Bogue Chitto, MS where we competed in 6 matches against 8 different teams from across the state. The day began with a rocky start after we left our engineering portfolio at our meeting place prior to departure, but thankfully we were able to print out a new copy as one of our adult members rushed to buy a binder. The competition’s start wasn’t only rough for us though, before matches began our team members aided FTC Team #9298 Bionic Cobras to repair their robot just in time for competition. By the end of the day, we were ranked 4th seed, and were selected by 2nd seed FTC team #14799 Javawocky to be partners in the overall winning alliance. Additionally, we were awarded the Design award as well as named runner up for the Connect award.

In preparation for our next qualifier on the 21st, programmer Shan said the following regarding the steps we need to take to improve our strategy. “Something that I saw in this competition was our uncertainty of a strategy to use for Tele op. Because of this we ended up wasting a bit of our time trying to pull off a strategy we may have not tried before. We should definitely allot more time to discuss and practice strategies before the competition.” With only a week’s worth of preparation time in between competitions, we have been diligently working to improve our robot, code and strategy in preparation for this upcoming Saturday. We look forward to competing with our fellow teams in Meridian MS!