On 17^th of February 2018 the first Romanian regional event of the 2017-2018 First Tech Challenge at Kolozsvár. Several teams tried their skills on the playing field from different section of Transylvania like Marosvásárhely, Szatmárnémeti, Gyulafehérvár, Nagybánya, Nagyvárad, Dézs and of course Csíkszereda; in total 25 teams participated.

We met at 5:00 o’clock in front of the Kaufland supermarket and from there we used bus to go further. On the bus it turned out that Viktor ad István cannot come with us because of some nasty disease, so only ten of us and of course our mentors has appeared on the event.

The travel time took approximately 5 hours, so we arrived at ten o’clock to the Avram Iancu high school, with the first teams over there. Our early arrival wasn’t a problem for the organizers, we got a class room where we could leave our stuff, after that, on the test field we was enabled to do fine tunings on the robot and on the program code. For 12 o’clock everything had to be in its final form, so we had to be fast but more importantly accurate. Slowly other teams started to appear, so we could see on other team’s robots and on the way they are acting that how many chance we have.

Probably the first thing we have observed is that we used the most 3D printed parts, what later on the judges appreciated. Moreover we could see that other teams are not too dare, most of the m used the basic model, but this means that there were a lot of similar “pushbot” looking robot. This obviously was better for us because our robot was more conspicuous of course the pink plastic material helped out in this as well :D.

At 12 the event started with the concert of local schools students, followed by the robot inspection, where all the robots were investigated, because they had to match the norms. This inspection lasted a thousand year at least it seemed to be, because of this the matches started 2 hours later. During the inspection we had enough time to take the launch in the schools cantina.

After the inspections the matches have started finally. I can say that the fortune was in our side because approximately all of our allies were good at what they did. Our best was 93 point and in alliance point 190. Everyone was surprised that as a rookie we performed well. During the game the engineering books were checked, we got a whole lot of useful advices from the judges. They also told us that, during the evaluation the book is far more important than the results earned on the playing field, so they appreciated, that we took that part serious.

At the end from the 25 teams we were ranked 4th, but based on ranking points we achieved the second place, furthermore from newbie teams we were rank 1. Honestly I think our results surprised everyone, we didn’t expect this kind of successes, because lots of the teams have got their tools and kits (we could only start working in January), we programmed robot for the first time, and the robot itself earned its final form at the last day before the regional event and we couldn’t really practice the control and test our codes. For the first look a lot of teams seemed to be prepared way better than us, because there was some complex robot, with extra components, the majority of teams already had their team T-shirts as well as more advertisement tools.

Lot of thank to our school and sponsors for their support, and we are preparing with full blast for the final stage, which will take place in Bucharest, where we still want to perform as good as we can. For this we need further support, because the advertisement and the appearance is important part of the competition.

Fodor Tímea, Máté Szilamér

Translation: Lőrincz Attila (=the guy to blame if something is not quite correct).