On Monday, a determined group of Fourth Form students journeyed into London to experience “The Crucible” at Shakespeare’s Globe. The journey itself presented challenges worthy of Salem, including mysterious power outages and sudden bouts of stormy (and potentially supernatural) weather.
writes Archit R (Fourths)
The team arrived on Saturday and spent the first day or two adjusting to the new time zone and familiarising themselves with the surroundings. From then on, the competition became the sole focus, with some late nights up working to be prepared. Things kicked off on Tuesday with the opening ceremony and early skills runs, practising for the main qualification matches. We had one of these on Tuesday afternoon, which went perfectly, securing the maximum Win Points possible from the match.
Wednesday was when the bulk of the matches were, which vastly went well, bar one match, where a small mishap meant we were disconnected for the game. Other than that, we went unbeaten throughout the day, ending in Second overnight moving into the final day.
A couple of unfortunate losses early on Day Three meant we were Thirtheenth going into elimination matches. One benefit out of that morning was a 46-point autonomous skills run, our highest of the season. We luckily managed to forge a strong alliance with a partner, despite a tense selection period, setting us up to come back in the quarter final. Nevertheless, the quarter-final match proved all too tough, up against the second seed, where we lost in a well-fought game.
To cap off the season, we were presented with the Design award, awarded to the team with the more organised and professional approach to the engineering design process. This is judged on engineering notebook and team interviews. Being acknowledged in a formal capacity was a very proud achievement, and tempered the loss of the tournament as a whole.
A huge thanks to Mr Cummings and Mr Carlon for accompanying us on the trip and for helping us out where needed. Mr Cummings’ excellent cheering skills in particular helped to get the crowd excited for our matches. Here’s to next year!
