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Girl Scout Robotics
The bearded Pineapples
We are the Bearded Pineapples, FTC team #11104 located in Kirkland, Washington. We are an all-girl team (10 girls) affiliated with Girl Scouts of Western Washington. The Bearded Pineapples are working with Girl Scouts to start a Girl Scout FTC program. Our team was started in 2014 during the 'FLL World Class' challenge. We participated in FLL for two years (during "World Class" and "Trash Trek") and got to State both times. After our last competition during "Trash Trek", we decided that we wanted to move on to FTC and started our FTC preseason two months later. We have now spent three successful years in FTC ("Velocity Vortex", "Relic Recovery", and currently "Rover Ruckus"). The first year we got to State, last year we advanced to Worlds, and this year we are going to Worlds as well!
2014 - 2016: FIRST LEGO League Years - World Class and Trash Trek
In 2014, we started as FLL team #58 and had 7 team members, but for 2015 we were down to 6. For "FLL World Class", our research question was "How can we improve the way children learn how to lead a healthy lifestyle?" Our solution was to write an app that shows kids that it can be fun to exercise. We did program "The Bearded PineApp" using Xcode and Swift, but we didn't publish it on the Apple app store.
We were thrilled to make it to the Washington State Championships. We won a Champion's Award at the Eastside Qualifier and a programming award at the Championship Tournament. Not bad for a rookie team!
In 2015 we participated in the "Trash Trek Challenge". Our project was to try to reduce the production of meat and bones. To do this we made pamphlets that made it easier for people to get used to eating crickets, which create less waste.
​We won a Champion's Award at the Qualifiers and the Semifinals, and we got a Gracious Professionalism Award at the State Finals. After that we decided we wanted to move on to FTC. We handed our old number (58) down to the Weasel Eggs and we started meeting to learn about Tetrix© parts and Android Studio, which is what we used for our robot for the 2016-17 season.
2016 - 2017: FIRST Tech Challenge Rookie Year - Velocity Vortex
After starting our FTC preseason in March to learn as much as possible, we lived through an emotional roller coaster at the Tesla Interleague Event. We felt so lucky for being picked by Atomic Robotics as second pick, and advanced through that ... and the Inspire Award!
2017 - 2018: First time to Worlds - Relic Recovery
During the 2017-18 season, Relic Recovery, our team had multiple issues at our two League events - everything from WiFi disconnections to our grabber breaking caused issues for our robot. Luckily, we were able to turn this around at the Pasteur Interleague event; we managed to stay undefeated during the Interleague (after being "utterly defeated" at our first two events) and were picked by the first seed as their second pick. We advanced to the Washington State Championship (February 11th, 2018) along with our alliance partners, #11120 Cedar Park Robotics and #8628 Chickenados. We were very honored to win the #1 Inspire Award as well! Our team attended two State competitions: the Washington State Championship in our own state and the Idaho State Championship (in Idaho). At the Washington State Championship, we placed as finalist alliance captain with our alliance members: #11120 CPR and #13648 Jankbot. We were very honored to won Design Award and win 3rd nominated for Inspire! We were surprised to learn that we won Inspire at Idaho state, along with being finalist alliance captain with our alliance, 11970 Titanium Talons and 12744 Bruin Blue Crew. We later attended the West Super-regional Event in Spokane, Washington, and advanced to the World Championship in Houston!
2018 - 2019: Growing the Team - Rover Ruckus
We started our 2018-2019 season, Rover Ruckus, off strong, winning over half of our qualification matches at our League events. Before the Interleague competition, we did not have a collecting arm on our robot. We scored points with our full autonomous and by pushing minerals. We advanced from Interleagues by being second pick of the winning alliance, second nomination for Control award, third nomination for Connect, and we won the Think award. At the Washington State Competition, we won a decent amount of matches, placing us at rank #17. We were the second pick of alliance captain, #8628 Chickenados and alliance partner, #417 SKID. Unfortunately, we lost our semi-final matches. However, we advanced to the Houston World Championships through receiving first runner-up for the Inspire Award. We also won the Control award and got second runner-up for Think. One of our members, Madeleine Goertz, is a Dean's List Finalist. At Worlds, our team committed to a large-scale scouting and scoring operation where we individually scored every robot in every single match it played. (You can read more about this here.) We won the "Big Data Share" Judges' Award for our efforts. We had an outstanding consistency playing the robot game, scoring close to our predicted amounts in nearly every match. We also vlogged all our days in Houston and discovered a new joy for the filming and editing of videos.
2019 - 2020: A Series of Unfortunate Events - SKYSTONE
Our 2019 off season began with an exciting foray into new projects: we dove head first into odometry wheels and building a modular drive base. Breaking the cycle of absolutely bombing our league events, we finally started the season off well with a strong showing, winning more of our league event matches than we lost. This may have been due to our all-in strategy; instead of building a "league bot" while we worked on the CAD for our "real" bot, we went all in with our robot from the beginning.
The Fall was also very exciting for our team, as we hosted a panel at Geek Girl Con! We spoke on our experience as an all-girls team and demoed to our audience. Twas a blast!
Our Interleague competition was also very successful, with us winning the Inspire Award and being the Finalist Alliance Captain. We were experiencing issues due to our tracking wheels over-heating, but setting the robot outside for a bit did the trick! At State we ranked 6th and were apart of the Finalist Alliance. We were also nominated for the Connect award! A very successful day, however, we did not advance to Worlds. Unfortunately, COVID-19 caused the cancellation of Worlds and we are disappointed with the thousands of teams looking forward to going. There's always a rainbow after rain, though, and for us that's an extra long offseason! We are so ready for next year's challenge and can't wait to see you there!