Narwhals Always Win

Today we all wore LBCC shirts that didn’t exactly match.

“Next year, we should call ourselves the ‘otterpops,'” joked one club member.

“Our theme this year is ‘as cheap as possible,'” said another.

Our robot did look a little lame next to the sleek models sported by other schools. The frame was constructed from PVC, which is a pretty cheap material, and a lot of our components were make from stuff found around the lab from previous years.

Still, we were confident that our little robot could pick things up and move them around with it’s nifty claw made from hairbrushes.

The claw in operated with pressurized air from a dive tank. Kyle, our CEO, stopped by a dive shop yesterday and rented a dive tank to run it.

Today, when it came time for our robot to run through the missions tasks, we suddenly realized that our tank wasn’t connecting to the system right. So Sam P, who was so sick yesterday that he had a temperature and was barfing and couldn’t participate in our presentation, madly sprinted around the parking lot until he found our van and got the spare tank.

So. 2/3’s of the time we had no pneumatic power. Most of the tasks involved moving things around the pool, and we had no working claw. Still, we managed to get 195 out of 300 possible points, which puts us currently in about 4’th or 5’th place.

This is all thanks to our phenomenal driver Griffin.

Yesterday we snapped a picture of Griffin standing next to a statue of a guy who looked eerily like him.

Tomorrow we will have a chance to run through the missions again, and if we get a higher score it will override today’s score.

Also, we will get a significant amount of points from the tech report, the poster, and the presentation we did yesterday.

I won’t know how we did on those three things until tomorrow. I went up and checked on our poster to see if there was a score on it yet, and there wasn’t. But someone had stuck a sticky note on it with our team number.

There was a group of judges next to me. “We put sticky notes on the ones we thought could be first or second place,” I overheard one of them say to another.

I counted. There were about five posters that had sticky notes on them.

So overall things are looking pretty good for the Narwhal.