Titusville - Still Connected

Sundays always start out with donuts from Donuts 4U, the best ever

We are in the second year of robot competitions in Connecticut. I never imagined such a big deal to be made out of robotics. My two granddaughters are in a STEM school in Hartford and they compete yearly in the competitions with other schools including many out of state. Each year it's different in what's expected of a robot. Each year, the robot has to be built from scratch to include machining all the parts from raw metal. As you might expect, this consumes gargantuan amounts of time.

The robotic field of competition. You have to put balls into the containers, climb stairs, and more

The robots then compete in an arena in doing the assigned tasks, guided by the kids with remotes. The school then sends teams to a regional event, then the winners go to the state events, and the winners there go to the nationals. All this is done by high school students.

You have to machine your own parts!

Where we come in is in the streaming. Phil was at the event with his two daughters, his sister (Carrie) was in Pennsylvania, and we were in Florida. The entire event was live streamed over the internet. So we watched breathlessly as Phil's team competed, we cheered, we commiserated, it was live action! We started watching around 10:00 and didn't turn it off until 5:00 pm. All the time, we were trading comments back and forth over iMessage.There were about 160 or so teams there.

So even though we were down in Florida, we were still participating with our family in the event. It's a small world anymore. The internet is great!