DME Final Competition

Alright, sorry this has taken so long to get here, but it's almost impossible to find free time during Orientation, craziness! As you know, I've been doing/did a pre-orientation program known as "Discover Mechanical Engineering" where I built a robot playing soccer bot. Saturday was the competition and I got plenty of coverage.

We started the day with a warm breakfast of eggs and pancakes before heading over to the science museum. I've been to the science museum before, but I took the T that time. This time we walked . . . in the humidity . . . the 80% humidity . . . and the 80 degree weather. I managed to complain about the weather the entire way there, all one and a half miles.



When we got into the museum and realized that it was air conditioned we all went nuts. We were cheering and leaning up against the concrete wall and gasping and generally being happy that we were no longer dying of heat.

(That entire last paragraph was an exaggeration. Just replace the "we all" and "we were" with "I" and "I was")

After getting all settled in and finding our competition location we had some down time to wander the museum.







Check out the end of the post for a video of all the festivities. A couple of stories are worth mentioning though, the first being the exploding robot. Our leader's name was Trip and his main chore was to make sure all the wireless receivers were functioning. He ran around the entire week making sure everything worked. After assuring that everything was functional and ready, he ran off and put on the Tim the Beaver costume. Here's me and Tim:



After being back for about 3 minutes in costume we heard somebody yell. Glancing over we saw a control box pouring smoke. Trip, as he told me later, totally panicked and wanted so badly to try to fix it, but he was dressed as a giant beaver. Completely helpless, he did the only thing he could do, which was run up to the box and wave his arms around wildly and jump around. It was quite a sight to see.

Our team didn't do so hot, although we did win one round. Mostly it was just fun to watch robots destroy the other robots, nobody really paid attention to the rankings. I took a picture with my camera phone from 2 floors above the playing field.



Here's a picture of my team with our robots



As you can see, I have the "Green Monster," so now you know which one to look for in the video at the end of this post.

After the competition we headed to the sailing pavilion to do some sailing. During the down time before actually sailing I got in a semi-good nap. I say semi-good because all of my teammates decided to tie my shoes together while I was sleeping. After my nap we hopped onto the sailboat and sailed around for a bit, which was quite fun. We especially enjoyed the pirate war.

Pirate war? Here's the jist of it, you sail up alongside another sailboat so there's about 2 feet between you and them. Then, using balers, splash as much water into the other boat as possible. We all got soaked! Oh, speaking of pirates, did you know you could get a pirate's license at MIT? You have to take a ropes, sailing, fencing, and pistol class. Nifty, eh?

After we docked we decided to ambush the other boat, which can be seen at the end of the video at the end of this post. So, without further adieu, the video that I keep referring to!



My advice to incoming freshmen hopefuls? Do DME! If nothing else, it's free admittance to the Science Museum!