Team Pronto takes its robot Steve to regional event

This past weekend Shoreline's Team Pronto competed at the regional event at Mount Vernon High School with 34 other teams.

Our robot "Steve" (yes the students named it) started working very well and could score points all by itself in the autonomous part of the game. Steve really was shining and then the students would drive it and make even more crossings of the field and scored almost every time it had a cannon ball.

Our alliance partners were not always so strong, so this caused us to have a losing record going into the finals selections. The highly ranked teams saw all the wonderful things Steve was doing and this caused much excitement that we would be selected for the finals.

The number 2 ranked team selected Team Pronto to compete with them in the finals. Our alliance partners were strong and we quickly put to rest the quarter final competition teams. Then in the semi finals we quickly scored the first win only to have it overturned because of a field computer concern so that match had to be replayed.

Team Pronto stepped up and repeated the match and then won by over double the score of our competition.

Team Pronto then won the next match quickly, sending themselves to the finals. Steve was showing some small problems from all the rough play but he seemed to be in good shape, the team thought.

In the first game of the finals Steve did his normal autonomous scoring but then something went wrong.

The students could not control the robot's movements and our alliance was having concerns with only 2 working robots.

When the students removed Steve from the field they found he had suffered a failure of the drive wheel pulley. It was shattered and would not easily be replaced, even if we had a replacement.

Team Pronto then decided to call in a replacement team to fill in for our broken robot. Without Steve on the field the alliance was not as strong as with Steve, so the alliance suffered a second loss. This dropped us out and gave the alliance the second place trophy.

--Wesley Proudlove