kickoff (sorry this is a little late)

(written by divya)

Today was kickoff, and we found what we had been waiting for so long: the challenge. The challenge, called Lunacy (named based on its moon theme), entails the robots dropping moon rocks, hollow teflon-covered balls, into opponent robots' attached trailers. In a section of the competition, one of us human Gatorbotics members has the opportunity to throw moon rocks into the opponent robots' trailers, too. We better hope one of us has hidden hoops skills, or as Tobi said, practice when we're stressed. After Erin, Tobi, and I attended kickoff to pick up the kit and discover the challenge, we returned and in the Choral Room, Erin shared the information with the rest of the team (well, a critical part: JUNIORS: of the team is on the other side of the world right now =[ ). Aside from introducing Doug and Jimmy to the new freshmen, we all met Brian, a new mentor. We then went on to the fabulous new robotics room to brainstorm ideas for this year's challenge, inventory everything in the kit of parts (all 27 pages of the checklist), and fix tape on/wires (splicing took quite a while for Tobi, Shreya, Anna, and me, but we managed =D ) of the batteries.

Here is the challenge video:
http://robotics.nasa.gov/events/2009_frcwebcasts.php

Here is the like to this year's manual:

http://www.usfirst.org/community/frc/content.aspx?id=452
I would plan on reading sections 7-10