The robot has passed inspection, the booth is decorated beautifully, and we have been joined by Joey Zhou. All in all a very satisfying day. Of course, Team 902A is not done for the night. The team members still have an hour before curfew, which means the scouts will be sharing what they have learned about other teams, builders will be replacing two gears on the arm, and programmers will test their new firmware and VEXNet key updates. No rest for the weary.

Tomorrow is also a busy day. The team's first practice match begins at 12:19, then they proceed to three of their preliminary round matches. These matches can be streamed from the following link:http://www.robotevents.com/robot-competitions/vex-robotics-competition/2014-vex-robotics-middle-school-world-championship.html. Team 902A is in the Spirit division.

Here are some photos that help document the day:

Posting these photos to document our students' industriousness:

Math

Math and SS

Super Duper Rubik's cube

Here is a picture of our home for the next few days. Get psyched!

Arrived in Anaheim!

We made it! All members of the team are settled into the hotel and we are in the process of recovering from a long travel day yesterday. This morning, we will be working on the robot, shopping for booth decorations, and laying in some food supplies for the week. Convention Center opens this afternoon when we will get the robot inspected, set up the booth and get some practice driving in. Competition starts tomorrow! Check out the live feed starting tomorrow on www.robotevents.com.

Beautiful beach day for the memory book

Poolside Party Pictures

Zombies from the deep

Chinese food restaurant delivers!

Filling, if not gourmet

Waiting for the food allowed a long time for swimming.

The attitude is gratitude

It is easy to get discouraged when things don't go as you think they should. If any of  you watched the streamed matches, you would have seen evidence that robots don't always do what you want. We saw our robots get stuck on sacks, spontaneously lose power to the arm in the middle of a match, and even spin in circles without any input from the controllers. Thankfully there is more to this experience than winning. You win some, you lose some. The important thing is how you play the game, right?  Try telling that to a very competitive middle schooler. Sure, it is a heck of a lot more fun to win. Our challenge is to teach them how to lose graciously. Do you get stuck in the blame game or do you focus on identifying and solving the problems you can fix? Do you give up trying to fix what you think is wrong or do you bounce back and do your best in each moment? Obviously, we want our kids to learn resilience and perseverance, so we give them opportunities like the World Championships to practice these qualities.

And what a world event this is! This is truly the Olympics of robotics. We witnessed more than 700 teams from 24 countries parade across the stage of the Super Dome yesterday morning and not one American team won either middle school division. We have quite a lot of work to do to play a role on this large of a world stage. So top of the agenda at last night's team meeting was to check the team members' attitudes and make sure they considered all the had to be grateful for. Are they grateful for this opportunity to see the best VEX robots in the world? Are they grateful that they have beds, food, and a hotel pool? Are they grateful for each others' camaraderie and for our supervision? All of that was expressed. An attitude of gratitude? You bet! 

Second on the agenda was safety. After two days of allowing a freedom of movement within the confines of the convention center, we are back in buddy system mode where we move and make decisions as a pack. And Doug and I are alpha wolves, without question. Tomorrow the team will travel to Newport Beach, taking public transit, so that we can all dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean. 

Troubleshooting

Nothing ever goes as you expect it to go. Looking at the results of a match or even seeing the match streamed live on robotevents.com doesn't show what goes on when the robot comes back to the pit. So much rebuilding. So much reprogramming. So much redesigning. So much negotiating. So what if they aren't so good at cleaning up after themselves? You can't have everything!