By Maxine Leuschen

           CalGames is an off-season practice competition for those who are new on the team to see how the competitions in March and April will go. My friends and I saw how much fun CalGames was. There was a lot more excitement than I expected from a robotics competition. CalGames was held in San Jose this year. We stayed down there for about 2 days and one night. In that short amount of time, I saw a whole new side of robotics that I never even thought about. 

            I worked mostly in the pits helping wherever I could. I also sat in the bleachers watching the robotics matches and talking with my teammates. The pits were set up in a separate building, and we had to build our own pit area ourselves—we set up all of the tools and other things we may need, made sure we had enough space to work, and fit our robot on its cart into a small spot that they had taped off for us. We had to fix numerous things on the robot, since we had new controls, and we had to fix our robot’s connection with the wireless connection on the field.

            I had fun hanging out with my friends on the team. When we actually started competing later in the day, we’d start dancing to a song that they had playing in the background, and we would cheer for Andy, our robot. We had some difficulties on the field that day, so we stayed a little bit later to fix Andy.

            The next day included tons of cheering and dancing, especially our special Fembots dance called the “Cotton Eye Joe”. Our team spent the entire day watching robots compete in matches, scouting teams, and seeing how an alliance with other teams would be. There were two different alliances: the red alliance and the blue alliance. There were three teams on each alliance that would help each other score points.

Overall, CalGames was a great learning experience. I learned so much—what to expect from competition, different strategies, the different teams, and the different things about our robot, Andy.