Thanks to our teams amazing efforts put in throughout this amazing season, all the way through DCMP, we qualified for the FIRST Championship in Houston! In our time competing, we were placed in the Johnson Field division.

In the weeks between DCMP and Champs, we made many changes in hopes of a better performance on the field with our robot, Gimli. Our biggest change we made was trying to add an adjustable hood, and hood rollers. With these changes, we were hoping to see improvements in our shooting speed, and more control with scoring and passing fuel.

Upon arrival of our first day, we had load-in, where we  brought in our pits - a series of work benches and storage compartments that house all of the tools we need to fix and repair our robot. Later in the day, after we set up our pits, we had some practice matches, giving us time to test our robot on the field, and make adjustments or repairs if we needed to. These practice matches also allowed us to meet and play with the other teams on our field, some of the best in the world.

On the second day of competition, all of the divisions began their qualification matches. Unfortunately, in the autonomous period, we surfed on the fuel during our first pass in many of our matches, causing many preventable losses. We also had a slight programming error during this time that prevented our robot from properly aligning to the hub, hindering our ability to score fuel. On top of this, we also had an issue with our kick rollers that we added leading into our State competition. During a practice match, we bent one of the rollers This meant that the entire set stopped spinning, impairing our ability to accurately score. Coming out of day two, we ended with a record of 2-3-0.

On the third day, we pushed through our mechanical problems by finding temporary fixes, and we completely solved our programming issues, allowing us to have some really good matches with the best teams in our division. Now that our robot was mostly working, we were able to show off what we can do. We full-field passed, had fast and accurate scoring, while playing as clean as possible. We finished day three with a total record of 5-5-0.

We wrapped up on day four, and the entire team was waiting anticipatingly to see if we would be picked for alliances. One by one first, second, and third picks were announced. Eventually, Alliance 5 of 190 Gompei and the H.E.R.D., 118 the Robonauts, and 1002 CircuitRunners chose us as their backup bot.
In playoffs, we were unable to play in any matches. However, our alliance was able to make it to Playoff Match 13, which was one match away from finals. Unfortunately, our alliance was knocked out, but our team continued to cheer for teams as we had front row seats to the Einstein field. Although we were not able to do much at the FIRST Championship this year, our team is ever so grateful to have made it in the first place and to give this experience to our members.