2nd Annual Spaghetti Feed

The second annual Vanden Robotics Spaghetti Feed was held November 4th, 2017. Each of the students in the robotics program sold tickets and invited their friends, family, teachers and community to our event held at Golden West Middle School.

There were several entertaining events for the night: Vex and Vex IQ demonstrations led by RoboVikes and students of the middle and elementary school robotics teams, a basket raffle, a dessert auction, and our competition robot and game presentation. We also offered the guests to buy Vanden Robotics merchandise. Leadership team shared about general team statistics, updates and goals. Also 5 RoboVikes alumni were present and shared with everyone how FIRST has helped them and where they are now.

Students volunteered to serve the spaghetti dinner and help run the various events for our guests. The spaghetti, bread, salad, desserts, and drinks were provided by the boosters and students. The raffle baskets were donated by local businesses in Fairfield and Vacaville. Thank you to everyone who helped make this night a success!

Overall, we were successful and raised $5,500 profit!

2017 Capital City Classics

Capital City Classics was our second and last off-season competition and took place  10/27-10/29. Friday we set up for the weekend and proceeded to replace the radio during field connections and persevere through electrical issues in the pit.

This competition we decided to compete with two robots (701-Ragnorak & 9701-X1) and two separate drive teams. This had its challenges but by Sunday both teams advanced to eliminations and 9701 got all the way to semifinals. ("We were one gear away from finals" -Engineering Director; "You should write that in the blog" -President ;) Additionally, we won the Capital City Judges Award because of our outreach contributions to our school district, Migrant ed, and Camp Athena.

As we said in the previous blog, their were improvements to be made after our last competition, Chezy Champs; Autonomous, scouting, and spirit were definitely some aspects to work on. At this competition, we had a consistent autonomous, especially for 9701, great spirit, and comparable and reliable scouting data done by by veterans and rookies.

Overall this years Capital City Classics was quite successful for off-season and a major improvement from Chezy Champs.