Following two tournament wins and a state showing last winter, it was unclear how the season would play out this year for the Hutchinson Middle School robotics team.
With many team members departing for Hutchinson High School, 60 percent of the team was first-year students. Now, after two rollercoaster tournaments, the TigerBots have their answer: They're heading back to state.
At a tournament in Lakeville, the team went undefeated in its 10 seeding matches. Then in the elimination rounds of the Lakeville tournament — which is when teams group together to compete as alliances — it lost two matches by one point.
"But we won the design award," said coach Dan Scheele, "which was given based on good performance of the robot. They liked the look of it, they liked how we went about the design. That was the first time we've won that award."
Then this past weekend the TigerBots went undefeated clear to the semifinals. They won in the semifinals, but in the finals ran into difficulties.
"In the first match the robot locked up and didn't communicate with the controller," Scheele said. "The second we lost due to penalty points from our partners. It was really a rollercoaster of emotions because we had great mornings and had these events out of our control. And it cost us our finals."
But the twists kept coming. The team won the Think Award, which recognizes it's recorded daily work, design creativity, outreach efforts and engineering notebook.
"It's the story of the whole season," Scheele said.
The TigerBots also won the Stratasys Award due to the number of 3D printed parts it uses on its robot. However, it was the Inspire Award that would change the game. Due to a combination of a strong team performance on the field and an impressive engineering notebook, the team was recognized with this third award.
"That's the thing that punched our ticket for the state tournament," Scheele said. "We were recognized for our good performance, even if we didn't win."
This is the first time the team, now in its fifth year, has won these awards. It also marks its second state showing.
"It's been a cool season that way," Scheele said. "A lot of it is to do with high school robotics members and committed parent (volunteers)."
But now the students have set their eyes to Feb. 7-8, which is when it will compete at the First Tech Challenge Minnesota State Tournament at the Washington Technology Magnet School in St. Paul. This past week they put their heads together to figure out what aspect of the robot to improve.
"I suspect we will work on trying to do even more with the autonomous rounds," Scheele said. "Mechanically, there are a few features we've had on the robot that we never really used to date, and they talked about ... making those fully functional before state."
The TigerBots will face 47 teams at state. Nine will advance to the World Festival in Detroit.
"They are all excited to try to earn the right to advance even beyond the state tournament," Scheele said.
