This day started off early, especially for the boys as Kimi set his alarm an hour early at 5:30 am. This was especially tough since we stayed up late the night before preparing for our judges interview. Nonetheless, we were still able to get some rest and felt prepared for another day of the competition.

The day at the convention center started off with field inspection and robot sizing. After this we headed to the judges interview. This is a 5 minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of questions from the judges about what we did and achieved over the past season from engineering and design to outreach. This went really well, and the judges were very interested and enthusiastic about what we had to say.

After the inspections and judging were over, the matches were ready to start. However, just before the drivers’ meeting, the fire alarms went off! The entire building was evacuated, but luckily soon after we were outside we were able to safely enter once again and get ready for our matches.

We were scheduled for the very first match, and were both nervous and excited to see how we would fare. Our first match was in the blue alliance together with the US team Wrench Dressing. After a close match with some technical issues, we were able to win with 149 points against 126 points of the opposing alliance! This was a great start to a competition, and we were excited for the coming matches over the next couple of days.