botblog

To Tell You The Truth...

Plans are nearly finalized for our big celebration next Friday. We have some great stuff to auction off and raise more money for next year. If you donated through PayPal, you should have received an invitation to the celebration. If you didn't get yours, please email me and let me know. We'll have awards for all the kids and we have a fabulous documentary film to show. Food provided by our culinary department. I'm really looking forward to it. But I have to admit I have double reasons for that. I want to celebrate the kids' success, but I'm also tired and this will represent the end of the project... 'til next year...

The last day

We had a great match this morning and now rank 37th. If we do as well in our last match, we could end up being chosen as an ally for the finals. We did pretty well yesterday and the team definitely looks strong, but we had the misfortune of being turned over a couple of times by some big bully robots. We added a small leg to the arm this morning in hopes that we might be more able to right ourselves if it happens again.

Getting here before 8:00 every morning and staying 'til after 6 is a pretty grueling schedule for a group of kids suffering from jet lag. A couple of kids had to take a little nap break yesterday. Poor Raul and Kim went straight to the hotel and skipped dinner last night. We all had a hard time waking up this morning at 6:30.

It'll be nice to sleep in tomorrow. We have a little time to hang around before flying out. I'll try to get some pictures uploaded while we're waiting to leave. The worst is going to be having to be at school Monday morning!

Botlanta!

The kids are going crazy over sun, swimming pools and elevators that go up the outside of the building for 50 floors. Calvin and Kent got up at 6 to go swimming before heading over to the Georgia Dome at 7:45. Diego and Tom did not sleep at all and knocked on my door at 6, just 'cuz **they** were up.

The hotel is amazing (she says as she sits on the balcony over the pool typing this post, using the wireless connection here. Downside being I have to stay here to work on a faculty meeting presentation Nate and I have to do on Monday.). Thriftlodge was nothing like this! And the most incredible thing is that Nate got this hotel for the same price as we paid for the Thriftlodge in Portland!

Five arenas. 270 teams. The biggest pit we ever saw. The Dome is amazing. Our first warm up event went OK. Our new wheels arrived this morning at the hotel and we've figured out how to let them go swimming tonight after dinner.

The Boilermakers are living large but thrifty and working hard in Botlanta, thanks to all of you! Keep your fingers crossed tomorrow! The team is here at the finals! Go Boilermakers!

San Jose Event

It's a dilema. It costs $ 4000 to register for each event. A lot of dough for a poor inner city school, raising all its funds from generous neighbors and friends. Can we justify attending two regionals and hoping for the finals as a yearly mo?

Last year, we only attended the Silicon Valley event. We did great, for a rookie team. Came in 7th. Got a judges award.

This year, we learned that the bot suffers some damage at each event. We had a few problems the first few rounds. Wheels were slightly askew from so much turning. Connections were wearing. Drive chains were getting loose. By the time we had tweaked all that, we were down to 20th (out of 47) in ranking. We still had enough showing that one of the finalist teams picked us to be an ally, but we should have done better. The competition was not, as we had anticipated, much stronger in San Jose.

So, it's good that we went and learned all this. We'll do better in Atlanta for knowing. But what about next year? Should we plan on two regionals, just so we can tweak and learn? Or, is it too much to spend?

Any competitive bot people out there have two cents to throw in?

San Jose!

We arrived at the San Jose Event Center this morning before 8:30AM, got GGBOT out of the crate, and attempted a few practice rounds. There was a bit of trouble with the radio signal, the drive chain was a bit stretched and needed tweaking, 3 team members had baseball games to play, the seniors had to stay at school for tests, but by the end of the day, the team was tired and satisfied.

A team from Danville came up and said, "Hey, you were on TV! We saw you."

"We were on TV four times, the radio once, and in two newspaper articles!" Can you belive it?

We're hoping that some of you generous donors and supporters will come to see us tomorrow for the elimination events and Saturday for the finals. Silicon Valley offers some challenging matches and we're happy to be there. Expect some exciting robo competition.

Root for team 1031! Boilermakers! Yeah!

Acceptance Speech

Omigod! I feel just like the stars when they win the academy award. We have so many people to thank!

We have to start with our backbone support. The Columbia Lodge Masons were the first to pick up the Robotics Team cause. They've committed to a long term support that we believe is truly going to change our school and the lives of our students.

Then, we got another long term partner when the Associated General Contractors decided that robotics was to be included in their support of our Architecture, Construction and Engineering program. A group of these people show up monthly to support our efforts in the ACE Pathway.

We got generous grants from NASA and Best Buy. It was those grants, CLM and AGC who got us to the regional events and made the team possible this year.

Then, we qualified for the nationals and needed another 16K. I think that was when I emailed my best friend Suzanne and told her our plight. She put it on the Well. Then, Jeffrey emailed me and donated this subscription to TypePad. The trickle started. For a week or so, the 20, 50, 100 dollar donations were coming in and they made us feel really good, but we weren't thinking we could possibly make it to 16K in the short time we had. We have a huge job to do in adding all the names of the donors to this list. You're the people who help us remember that there is a lot of kindness and generosity out there. With the ever decreasing budgets in schools, teachers can despair of how much society cares about education. Thank you for reminding us that a lot of people do care about children and our futures.

Mayme and Izzy got us on KRON 4 and that raised the trickle to a stream. Not only did Wendy do a great job of reporting our story, she sent a check! At some point around that time, Norm at Macromedia got in touch, came over and met the kids and kicked down a big chunk of what we needed to make Atlanta a reality! We're hopeful that a partnership between our school and Macromedia is going to further strengthen the new and burgeoning Pathway Program here at O'C.

I don't even know how we got hooked up with KQED. Angie showed up with a tape recorder and the next thing I knew we're talking about George Lucas asking employees to contribute.

We have a pledge from the Giants and the Exploratorium to donate tickets for a raffle. In addition we must also thank Babylon Burning for giving us reduced prices on our tee-shirts. Our Prinicipal has backed us and written a check to back our initial entry fees for the competition.

Thank you all! We're going to Atlanta! We don't have to take peanut butter and jelly! We have enough to put all the kids in our tee shirts and create a pit atmosphere worthy of our team and its supporters.

Stay tuned for the Silicon Valley regional event news and then our adventure to Atlanta. If you'd like to become a long term robotics sponsor, there are a lot of jobs to be done and we'll be doing this all year long and in a summer program for all students in San Francisco. The community has truly made this possible and you have the promise that it will make a difference to you.

More Boilermakers in The News

KRON 4 New's will be following up with our team at 8:40 tomorrow (Friday) morning. See Boilermakers live! Also listen for us on KQED 88.5 FM at 9--"When is corporate funding acceptable in school?"

Karma

Yesterday, I wasn't here. This is what the assistant principal told me this morning when I came in today.

A guy walks into the office and says that he saw us on KRON. He wanted to talk to the principal. But the principal wasn't here either. So, he went into the assistant principal's office and threw down $450 in cash. He said that he had attended John O'Connell back when it was in the avenues and was the old vocational school. He had long wanted to pay off a debt.

It seems that he'd been feeling guilty for some time about the fact that he had stolen a vcr as a young impetuous bad boy and the story on channel four had pushed him over the line. He had to come in and pay off his debt!

Listen to KQED Tomorrow!

The Boilermakers Robot Team will be featured on KQED (88.5 on your FM dial) tomorrow morning. The local news airs at 6:30 AM and again at 8:30 AM. You can also catch the piece online at http://www.kqed.org/radio/

See the Boilermakers in Action!

April 1-3, we'll be at the Silicon Valley Regional event sharpening our skills and tweaking the bot. If you'd like to see our team and 46 other teams "raising the bar", come to the Event Center at SJSU. Directions.