Olympia School District hosted the third and final FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Olympia League Event on Saturday, December 21, at Olympia High School.  Seventeen teams from Thurston, Mason and Gray’s Harbor Counties competed in this series of League Events, whose combined results have determined these teams’ seeding at the Southern Washington Inter-League Championships on January 11, 2014 at Jefferson Middle School.

Teams competed in this year’s FTC challenge, “Block Party” (see this video animation.) This is an exciting game which combines strategy and technical challenges for teams to sort out and prioritize as they design and build a Tetrix-based robot programmed in Robot-C to tackle this year’s game.  The robot must perform autonomously for the first part of the match, then under two-person remote control for the remainder of the two-and-a-half minute match.  The competition takes place in a 12 foot square arena with four robots operating simultaneously as two randomly selected alliances.

Two rookie teams topped the cumulative Olympia League standings, with DERPA (team #7113) from Olympia High School ending up top seed, and the Radioactive Chinchillas (team #7705) from North Thurston placing second overall.  Two veteran OSD teams, Avanti’s BGIP (team #4448) and Olympia High’s Oly Cow (team #6424) placed third and fourth respectively.  The entire league was well represented with teams from Elma, Lacey, Shelton and Yelm placing fifth through 8th and the Broken Motors from Capital High School (#7112) ending up in 9th place.

Rookie and veteran teams alike all showed great progress through the three FTC Olympia League Events. The average score per match increased from 77 points in Event #1 on November 23, to 115 points in Event #2 on December 7, and finally to 177 points on December 23.  Teams now have three weeks to refine their robot hardware and software before the FTC Southern Washington Inter-League Championships.

On January 11 2014, OSD will host the Southern Washington Inter-League Championships where the teams from the Olympia League will be joined by teams from the Vancouver/Portland area to determine which teams advance to the the State Championships.  STEM Pals is looking for 60+ volunteers to help with this event.  If you or someone you know would be interested in helping, check out this Volunteer Needs page for more information.  The schedule for the Championships will be as follows:

7:15    Pit Admin and Volunteer Check-in arrive
8:00    Teams arrive
8:30    Judging begins
11:00    Judging ends
11:30    Opening Ceremonies followed by qual matches
3:30    Alliance Selection
4:00    Eliminations
5:00    Awards

The final standings from the third event as well as the cumulative 3-event Olympia League rankings are shown below:

Olympia League Ranking List, Event #3

QP (Total Qualification Points) – 2 Points for a WIN, 1 Point for a TIE, 0 Points for a LOSS.

RP (Total Ranking Points) – Ranking points are awarded using the losing alliance’s score in each match.

Highest (Highest Match Score) – The highest match score awarded to the team.

Olympia League Cumulative Ranking List, Events #1, #2 &  #3