"When designing our robot for this year we focused the stadium and the specific things that restricted movement, like the truss and the gate. We decided to avoid these potential penalties by looking for the best design with speed and mobility within the restrictions of the field. We looked at our past robot design and thought that it was a pretty good framework for this field. The small chassis that we had last year was light and quick, which easily allowed us to duck through the truss and avoid the other bots on the field. We took the design, but redesigned it to be more modular. We chose this modular design because it allows for quick size adjustments and repairs, plus this ease of access is great if any unscheduled disassembly might occur. One enjoyable quirk this design caused is its off-center wheels. While some may find this design choice painful to look at, we find it very humorous, and we have named our robot after it: the Off Center Defender, or OCD for short." - Ben H

"One struggle with our arm design was that we had to use a smaller arm to work with the small robot. We almost immediately decided to go with the simple design of a folding arm which allowed us to keep our small and speedy robot design.  With this arm design we quickly and efficiently picked up pixels and put them on the board. The quick arm raise also let us minimize how long it took to put the pixel on the board, so we got to take advantage of the driver control period." - Austin M

"I was tasked to create a Paper Airplane Launcher. I had to fix the problem of metal shooting out of the launcher. But with the design made by Matthew (our 3d model guy), there was a slit for the rubber band, so now it doesn't shoot metal." - Weston K

"Our jobs have been very fun this year. Since we gained experience on block code last year, we decided to use OnBot java this year. Luckily, since we used the same chassis design as we did in past years, we got our robot moving around very easily. Our main struggles were making the arm consistently lift to the same height and creating the autonomous. The arm was solved by using encoders to set the arm at various heights. We have also made great leaps in our autonomous. We designed the code so that once we have the model (it's training as I write this), we should be able to add it to the code and everything will work. Overall, this year has been a great learning experience for the whole programming team." - James F