On the weekend of March 1-2, we attended the Granite State Competition at Salem High School in Salem, NH, taking home an overall rank of 4th!

A few very special guests gave speeches before the event started, including FIRST founder Dean Kamen, New Hampshire Education Director Frank Edelblut, New Hampshire congresswoman Maggie Goodlander, and New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte.

Team member Yonatan had the opportunity to interview Dean Kamen. Mr. Kamen expressed his pleasure seeing politicians of different political parties using FIRST’s core value of “coopertition” to support FIRST robotics students. He then said that when students discover FIRST, they could go from not being interested in STEAM at all to being very interested, and that FIRST is “Not only really accessible, it’s not only really fun, it could be the start of a fantastic career”. Mr. Kamen closed by expressing that he admires how FIRST alumni become very successful in STEAM and in society as a whole.

After the speeches wrapped up, we started the qualifying matches. Our scouters were hard at work watching other teams’ movements to help our strategy team decide who to select as alliance partners in the playoffs. The qualifying matches were stressful for our drive team as we had a very tough schedule, facing off against strong teams such as Windham Windup and Mechanical Advantage on multiple occasions. Drive team member Liam said it was “a little unlucky, but we’ll do our best and just kinda win all our matches”. On top of that, we had a lot of matches with short breaks in between. While this was a setback, pit crew member Eliot said “we got done all the things that we set out to achieve”. In the end, we beat the odds and won 9 out of our 12 qualifying matches.

On Sunday, after the final qualification match, we went into alliance selection. We were ranked 4th, meaning we were captain of the 4th alliance. However, we happily gave up our position to join the alliance 2 captain, team 4909 (Bionics). Team 1512, The Big Red, rounded out our alliance as the third member. We fought our way through the upper bracket to the finals but we were ultimately defeated by alliance 1, consisting of team 9443 (Aluminum Panthers), team 6328 (Mechanical Advantage), and team 3467 (Windham Windup). For our hard work, we were awarded the Finalist Award.

We also won the Autonomous Award, an award presented to a team with the most effective autonomous programming. The judges said we “demonstrated a clear ability to reliably score coral in autonomous mode with a robust, reliable approach”. In the end, we are feeling great after our top position and awards. We hope to keep it up at our next competition at UNH on March 22-23!