Reminiscing on Humber

The week of March 17th in the stands of Humber Polytechnic, a gaggle of students sporting the ALT-F4 logo on their hoodies could easily be spotted. With gusto, they whooped their chorus: “seventy-five fifty-eight!”

Our second regional competition has gone by, and we performed with flying colours, winning the event by a landslide. We owe that to the toil in the lab and on the field that produced our bot, Vision. We’ve continued our streak of awards - at Humber, we won the Excellence in Engineering Award, given to only one team in the whole competition. However, we’re not just thrilled by the spectacular mechanics of the bot. The scouting app’s user interface has gotten a lot of praise across the board: we’ve been joking that it’s like “playing a video game”.

Armaan Chandarana, the developer of our scouting app, thinks of his work this year as a learning experience. He was inspired by ALT-F4’s scouting app for last year’s game, Crescendo, considering its strengths and weaknesses and building on them. He also did a lot of research, studying the superb scouting apps of other teams in the FIRST community. “The first time I made a button for the scouting app, I felt like I’d won the Olympics,” he laughs. “Then I realized there were still a few hundred more…and the search functions too,” he lists, as he reminisces on his process. He explained to me that in designing the user interface, he had to think about what someone totally new to the app would expect each button to do. The app itself looks just like the field, so it’s intuitive and is more of a simulation than any unwieldy form for data. He encountered many troubles initially - memorably, he once realized that every action caused the page to re-render itself, making it extremely laggy to operate - and each time, he persevered through to find a solution. Even as events started he worked tirelessly: our team can confirm that in the short time since our Centennial event, the app has already improved with the new feedback.

The drive to Humber Polytechnic (formerly Humber College), packed in a bus, was beginning to feel familiar. We had gotten our legs underneath us since Centennial College, and were settling into a routine at competitions. The anticipatory atmosphere, as teams from all over the district gathered together to celebrate a passion for robotics, was a warm welcome. There’s something unique about the common identity that you can find at any FIRST Canada event. We were constantly inspired by the creativity and dedication of our fellow teams; as alliance captain, it was exceedingly difficult to pick our alliance. Our collaboration with our alliance partners, team Revolt Robotics #4976 and The Erudites #10279, was stellar, and we parted ways excited to see each other on the next field.

By the end of the event, with an amazing record of 15 wins to 2 losses, we were happily coasting on our new momentum. The team rejoiced afterward, high-fiving and cheering like we always do following our efforts in each game. Representing our values of hard work has always been more important than the game itself, and everyone involved, whether in the pits, as drive team, or by scouting, knocked it out of the park this time. By the end, ALT-F4 was tied with teams 2056 and 4678 at the top of the Ontario district rankings, boosted by our spectacular performance at Humber. With one more Blue Banner on our wall, ALT-F4 was ready to take on our next destination: the Ontario Provincial Championship, a field that we welcomed seeing again with open arms.

Isabella Io

Grade 12 Student