WBI Ends 'Impact'ful Season

Westside Boiler Invasion had a wonderful end to our season over the weekend at the Indiana State Championship. After two weeks of struggling to integrate some mechanical & software improvements and feeling like every time we turned around something new & different had broken, our trip through the qualifications rounds was smooth sailing and we ended up ranked 4th overall with an 8-4 record. We chose CyberTooth from Northwestern and Castle Robotics from Castle High School down in Newburgh to join us in the playoff tournament, where we were eliminated in the second round.

We also came home with another Impact award. This is the most prestigious award in FIRST, given to teams that best represent a model for other teams to follow and embody FIRST's mission of inspiring youth both on our team & in our community to become science & technology leaders. And we were just as excited to see our Precision Guessworks friends from Lafayette Jeff win their first ever Engineering Inspiration award, which painting with a very broad brush is basically second-place Impact, and punch their ticket to the World Championship for the first time in more than a decade. They had asked a couple of our mentors & students for some help earlier this season, so we spent some time working with them & sharing advice on how to develop their community outreach efforts & best tell their story, and it really paid off!

Winning Impact automatically advances us to Worlds as well, but we decided a while ago that we would be declining to go this year. Due to the way the calendar worked out this year, the event is a week later than normal, which pushes us into AP testing season and Purdue end-of-the-year events and other stuff that creates logistical hurdles for too many of our mentors & parents & students to make it make sense to go. And, we've been the past three years in a row, and those of us who handle who handle all of the planning & logistics need a break. But, we are talking about doing a more travel-intensive just-for-fun, less stressful off-season event this summer instead!

Thank you for all of your support!
Brad Thompson
Mentor Lead, Team Lead, Software, Media, & Operations