Congratulations to Team Benny and the Jets on Making it to State
The Winnebago Council’s Robotics Team, Benny and the Jets, participated in their qualifier on Saturday, February 2, 2013, in Bettendorf.
It was a long day with check-in at 8 a.m. and awards at 5:30 p.m. Benny and the Jets began the day in interviews with the judges and presented their Engineering Notebook that documented the process of developing their robot. They then proceeded to technical inspections and finally to programming inspections. After that, they got a few chances to practice on the playing field.
The process of this competition is that Benny and the Jets were paired randomly with another robot in an alliance to compete against another 2-robot alliance on the playing field. There are rings hung up on each side of the field and they needed to get these rings from the side and put them on the central rack in order to score. Each team got five, two-and-a-half minute preliminary matches to score points. The first 30 seconds are run by programming your robot and then there was a two minute manually operated drive period.
Benny and the Jets’ first match ended in a score of 0 after their ring was knocked off by the opposing team, and their alliance robot not working. They quickly became a crowd favorite as the MC decided to sing their team name with the crowd replying “Benny” at the appropriate times.
For their second match, Benny and the Jets showed up only to discover that their alliance robot was double booked and not available, so they competed one against two. They managed to knock two rings on to the center board right off the bat, and then spent the rest of the time trying to block the other team’s “scoring” robot. The other team knocked off one of Benny and the Jets’ rings, but they ended up winning 1-0.
Their third match was after lunch, and although their alliance robot was not working, they still got 3 rings onto the center board.
For their fourth match, Benny and the Jets were paired up with 3-time state qualifier and won with a combined score of 18.
Their fifth and final match was against the eventual tournament winner. Although Benny and the Jets lost, they were the only team who was able to hold them under 100 points in a match. They spent most of the match blocking the opposite team from scoring, but were beat 40-21.
Benny and the Jets didn’t make the championship round, but stuck around for the awards ceremony to with the “THINK” award for how well their Engineering Notebook displayed their design and development process. As the state qualifiers were being announced, Benny and the Jets were about ready to pack up and head home to move onto other things. However, most of the spots that were to be filled were already filled up by other winners. They 7th and last state qualifier was being announced, and lo and behold, it was the winner of the “THINK” award, “BENNY AND THE JETS”.
Benny and the Jets will compete in the state championships in Iowa City on February 23rd!
