Brick Buddies - State Champions!

This weekend 5018 Brick Buddies, my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team that I help coach and mentor, won the Florida state championship!

Brick Buddies went into the state championship ranked as the #6 team in the state (out of 72) and finished qualifying matches with a 5-1 record and in third place behind two undefeated teams from nearby Middleton High School in Tampa: 3846 Maelstrom and 4997 Masquerade. Masquerade is last season's world champion and also won this season's Kentucky state championship last weekend.

After a lot of discussion and examination of possible alliance partner picks, the team decided to accept an alliance invitation from 3846 Maelstrom rather than remain the captain of the #3 alliance. That was a little controversial because that almost certainly meant giving up any chance of going to the world championship, but after a long season of competing against both Masquerade and Maelstrom with zero success, the chances of beating both of them twice with any of the available alliance partners looked very low. Either of them would be perfectly capable of winning this season's world championship and it's a real shame that both won't get that chance.

With a solid #1 seed alliance of 3846 Maelstrom, 5018 Brick Buddies, and 3839 NeXT, they moved on  to the elimination rounds. They won their first semifinal matches to advance to the finals. After losing the first match, they came back and won two matches in a row to take home the championship.

The drive team (which is the entire team of three kids) did very well, winning 5 of the 6 qualifying matches and all three elimination matches they competed in. They made the most of line bonuses whenever possible and mixed offense and defense very well. They also made great use of taking away ownership of pegs to eliminate line bonuses by opposing alliances.

The hard work on autonomous mode programming, especially by Sumukh, resulted in them scoring the 50-point bonus ring in 4 of 6 qualifying matches and in the crucial final elimination match. That was far better than any other team did in autonomous mode, where the robot drives itself based on timing and sensor inputs. One of my favorite moments was when an opposing robot hit them and knocked them off course. The robot still found it's way back to the floor markings and followed them to end up in an almost perfect position to score the ring.

They did great in judging as well, winning the PTC Design Award and being finalists for the Rockwell Collins Innovate and Connect awards. They were the second runner-up for the top judged award, the Inspire Award.

My goals for the team all season were to make it to the state championship, get to play in the elimination rounds, and get mentioned as a finalist for the Inspire Award. They achieved all three, blowing away the first two.

All of this even more amazing considering that they are the smallest team in the state. Most teams are made up of about 10 high school students, often from engineering magnet schools. Ours was one high school sophomore and two eighth graders and runs out of the coach's driveway / living room. The kids aren't as short as they were last season, but they still get "that's the whole team?" comments.

It was great to see all the hard work by the kids, coaches, and parents pay off.  If anyone is interested in mentoring or joining FIRST robotics at any level, feel free to contact me or Shelley Kappeler, the head coach for Brick Buddies.

Where did January go?

So January blew right by without me blogging at all. I'd even pledged to myself to at least post a weekly recap of interesting links and news, but here's at least a monthly recap:

Thinkamingo

I've been busy at Thinkamingo, working on some new app projects that haven't been published yet. I also shipped Name Dice for Android and the Amazon / Nook versions shouldn't be too much longer. I shipped updates to our Sports Card apps to fix numerous bugs and expand the color choices for the included card template. Behind the scenes, I also consolidated the separate copy-n-paste XCode projects into one reasonably well-managed project with targets for each app. That should hopefully scale when we add additional sports. Finally, I submitted ports of our Android apps (Lists for Writers, Story Dice, Name Dice) to the BlackBerry app store using their Android runtime. It took a few slight changes, mostly to handle different market links, but it was fairly quick and easy.

FIRST Tech Challenge

Team Brick Buddies has been busy getting ready for their league championship and the upcoming state championship. At the league championship, the robot ran fairly well except for a flakey NXT cable. Between strong driving, a solid robot, and a little luck, they finished qualifying rounds 4-2 and in 3rd place. They picked a good alliance partner in Team Duct Tape and went on to win in the semifinals. In the finals against Masquerade and Maelstrom, two very strong teams from Middleton High School, they  fought hard but lost. In judging they did well and were finalists in multiple categories but finished in second place behind Masquerade for the overall judging for the Inspire Award. They'll likely head into the state championship in 5th-7th place in the state (out of 72 teams). They clearly have some work to do if they want to really push the top teams and fight for a spot at the world championships.

Geek Calendar

I've been meaning to try to set up a "geek calendar" of some sort with upcoming techie-style local events for developers and parents. Here's my first set of events: Tampa Bay Geek Calendar.

Busy Year

I couldn't let 2012 come to an end without a single blog post here. I have almost a dozen draft posts from this year sitting around with about a paragraph done, so maybe some of those will make it onto this blog. But this has been a busy, hectic year.

The biggest thing for me this year has been building Thinkamingo - our new educational app development company. We grew the company from zero to a viable business in 2012. In the process, I've learned iOS development and a whole lot about app marketing. In the past year I've shipped 12 iOS apps (though our 5 sports card apps share a lot of code), 2 Android apps, and 1 Windows Phone app. Not every app has been a success but some have far exceeded my expectations. Our apps have appeared on high profile blogs and even on Boing Boing and NPR - both thanks to Make's Mark Frauenfelder. Not a bad first year. We look forward to really growing the business in 2013 and someday being able to share more of our numbers and growth story.

Another big thing in 2012 has been mentoring and coaching my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team, Team Brick Buddies. They're a small team made up of mostly middle school students competing against a lot of high school teams. They did very well in the rookie season, making it to the state championship.  They are now mid-way through their second season and already planning for the state championship. They're also building up quite a trophy shelf by winning one tournament last season and winning a judged award at every single event they've been to. To cap it off, they won "most popular exhibit" at the TBTF coolTech 2012. They've also competed in MoonBots for two seasons and we've had a great time getting to know the Orlando area Google Lunar XPrize competitor, Omega Envoy. It's been a lot of work (and driving) but it pays off when I listen to what people say after meeting the kids and hearing them present what they're doing. In 2013 I'm expecting to return to FIRST LEGO League as our son and his friends should finally be old enough to compete. 

2012 has also seen a lot of Cub Scout activities. Though I've had to decline so many opportunities to volunteer (in scouts and other places) to work on our business, we've been busy camping, working on achievements and belt loops, and trying to win at Pinewood Derby.

This fall, I took a train trip to Williamsburg / Jamestown with my mom and my son. I haven't ever really travelled by train except for a few quick trips from Princeton to Manhattan. Train travel is ... different. It was nice having plenty of space, weird not going through security at all, frustrating to sit motionless for hours, and ultimately exhausting to spend 22+ hours on the train each way. The particular train didn't have wifi (some do) and we lost cell coverage quite a bit. It did have electricity and I packed plenty of movies, ebooks, and music for the trip. Williamsburg and Jamestown were good to see and a reminder that one of our goals is to get travelling while the kids are old enough and young enough to appreciate the things we visit. We have to get busy though.

Tampa had its first Mini Maker Faire in 2012 and there are at least two local makerspace efforts in the works. I would love to see at least one get started. I did get two Raspberry Pi boards and a STM32 board to play with some electronics but haven't done much yet.

On the gadget front, I also picked up a Nexus 7 tablet. I've had an Android phone before and the kids have Kindle Fires so I wasn't new to Android, but the Nexus 7 is a real game-changer. Much faster than the old phones I had, big enough to really read on, small enough to carry almost everywhere, cheap enough to not worry too much about breaking, etc. It's become the device I use the most (other than my laptop) even being wifi-only.

I've done almost nothing on most of my hobbies in 2012. I barely touched amateur radio. I don't think I took any serious non-snapshot photos or did any artwork outside of some Thinkamingo projects. I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2, which has finally replaced Quake III Arena / GTA as the video game I use to blow off stress. In 2013 it would be great to replace that with actually getting back on the bike and putting in some real miles.

So that's a short version of my 2012. Hopefully I'll post again before 12 months pass.