Written by Leo and Benjamin.
Autumn came particularly early this year - you could smell the scent of autumn in August, and the air was getting cooler in early September - so it was already autumn during the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. Autumn in Beijing... is full of tricks. People become delicate and artificial in this desolate place, but they can't enjoy themselves. They are in a dilemma. How can we say it is a dilemma? If I have to say it, people's thoughts are mostly occupied by the sadness/loneliness/longing of autumn, and they don't have enough "determination" to calm down and do good things. Thinking about it this way, it's a good thing that autumn in Beijing is so short, otherwise all mankind would have to fall here.
In the season of deep quagmire, there are always people who look up at the stars at night. These people may be unwilling to do nothing/may be unwilling to stand still/may be unwilling to watch the autumn leaves fall. So, after a long period of silence, the students who could not stand the loneliness and were eager to try decided to start moving forward. When they thought that the long-buried wish of the robot school team finally had a chance to be realized, "determination" regained the ownership of the brain... Since there is "determination" to calm down and do good things, some seemingly impossible things have become a matter of course... Autumn, which originally represented sadness/loneliness/longing, was given a new meaning: Benjamin realized that autumn is not just the falling of dead leaves, but the changes in autumn also symbolize the transition of life stages, which makes people reflect on growth/passing/future and inspire further thinking about life. So, we started running!
So, after solving some invisible and intangible problems, the journey was officially started. As the saying goes, everything is difficult at the beginning. Soon, Benjamin encountered the first hurdle in the journey... After the robotics elective course was approved by the school, the project needed the participation of many students to proceed smoothly. However, at the beginning, Benjamin was not very sure about the degree of interest of the students, especially this "new" course format in BAID.
Although we were a little worried, the number of applicants after the briefing exceeded our expectations. The number of applicants for the first choice was more than we thought, which was quite a pleasant surprise. Since we had already communicated with other campuses and made presentations there, we had to start to seriously consider the personnel screening, which involved resume screening, interview arrangements and other tasks. At the same time, there were new students from other campuses who wanted to join, so in order to ensure that everyone had equal opportunities, we had to arrange another round of interviews.
Throughout the process, Mrs.Liu gave our robotics team a lot of support and helped us complete the work of selecting personnel step by step. Although the task was urgent, this stage was successfully completed with everyone's efforts. However, after the selection was completed, a new problem arose: how to solve the problem of personnel transportation. A total of 18 students from different campuses needed to participate in activities across campuses. If there is no school bus pick-up, the taxi plan is an option, but it cannot be approved for safety reasons. At that time, Benjamin was in New York, and these problems even kept him awake at night. After returning to China, he hoped to communicate this problem with Principal Zhou offline, but unexpectedly, the principal and the school had already coordinated the arrangement of school bus pick-up at a higher level when the school started. This most difficult hurdle was solved under the right time/place/people. So, the robotics team began to enter the predetermined track. It has to be said that founding something is a constant alternation between experiencing storms and calm after storms. After the hard work of founding the robotics club, it can be said that it has entered the first calm at present: So far, the VEX robotics elective course can be said to have been proceeding in an orderly manner...
That's why we are the kind of people who look up at the stars all the time, just like pirates who ride the waves on the sea all year round and can't stand the calm sea. Even if they reach the flat sea without wind and rain, they still want to create some waves to overcome it. From a pessimistic point of view, this is completely intoxicated by the "dissatisfaction"; from an optimistic point of view, this is also a positive attitude towards life. Look, Benjamin, who has created the robotics elective course, has started a new wave of crossing the waves: VEX Robot Beijing City Competition - In the just-concluded Beijing City Competition, the VEX Robot Team of Beijing Middle School performed well with the joint efforts of all the participating players and finally won the third place. This competition attracted many strong teams from the city to participate in the competition. The atmosphere on the field was tense and fierce. The team showed a very high competitive level in the group stage. At the beginning of the game, the 6353B team was in high spirits and won five consecutive victories in the group stage, and each game was constantly refreshing the highest score on the field of this competition: 42...44...46. These five games demonstrated the team's excellent teamwork ability and Benjamin’s skillful control of robot operation. Whether in field control, task execution, or dealing with on-the-spot changes, the team performed very steadily. However, in the last game of the group stage, Benjamin, who was operating on the field at the time, was obviously “carried away” by the winning streak in the first five games. He temporarily changed his usual style of play and went straight under the high hanging pole in the middle of the field to grab the ring below. This was a reckless and greedy decision. This risky move caused the chain of the ring suction device linked to the ring device to collapse, and in fact the entire vehicle lost its function. Even though Benjamin calmed down later and quickly thought about countermeasures and changed his playing style with Leo and other observers on the side, he still couldn't change the result of this game, and interrupted the unbeaten record in the qualifying round with a 5-point disadvantage. Despite this, with its previous outstanding performance, the Beijing Middle School team successfully advanced to the semi-finals and became the No.1 team.
At the beginning of the semi-finals, it seemed that the final chapter of this competition had been written explicitly or implicitly. In the first round, even as the No.1 team, even if the two teams with the best performance in the entire qualifying round were combined, fatal mistakes still occurred on the field. In the automatic stage, teammate from SOME school made a mistake, and in the manual stage, Benjamin once again recklessly (of course, it was also a mistake) knocked down the scoring base of his team in the bonus area. Benjamin suddenly became nervous, all the muscles in his body were tense, his body trembled slightly, and he was a little at a loss. Fortunately, teammate from SOME school became the god of war in the first round, and at the last moment, he lifted up the knocked-down base again, and finally won the first round with a 6-point advantage and successfully entered the semi-finals. However, in the semi-finals, due to the mistakes in the automatic program link, the robot failed to fully exert its full potential, resulting in a key point loss. In the subsequent manual stage, the teammate who was the god of war in the first round was disconnected for 30 seconds due to luck or fate (the connection between the handle and the machine was interrupted). After the reconnection, even if the two teams tried to turn the tide, the 30-second time gap still left an irreparable score division. The team that was most likely to win the championship lost the semi-finals. Although it failed to advance to the finals, the team still won the third place with a tenacious fighting spirit. Optimistically speaking, the experience of this competition has undoubtedly laid a solid foundation for the future development of the BAID VEX Robotics Team. The team led by Benjamin showed strong competitiveness and potential. The mistakes of the automatic program exposed some areas that need to be improved, but also pointed out the direction for subsequent improvement. In the future, the team will further optimize the robot design, improve the automatic programming, and improve the stability and adaptability in the competition. At the same time, through more training and competition experience accumulation, strive to break through the bottleneck in the next event and impact higher honors.
Thus, the VEX Robotics elective course once again entered the calm sea, and we will once again close our eyes, hoping to continue to listen to all directions, accumulate knowledge, and wait for the next blooming season; having already started running, no longer can westop, heading towards the vague yet clear front...