Hex vs. Crest
it turns out that the journey of a lifetime begins with a video."
How easy does it sound to split up a newly formed team into two independent groups and still expect everyone to have a close relationship? Sounds hard? Trust us, it’s harder. By the third training session, the eight of us had been split into groups of four, and with the threat of the top five looming above us, the tension went to a whole new level. How does one expect to convince seven other people competing for the same thing and the coaches that they deserve the opportunity to represent our beloved country on a global stage, when they are working with only three random people? Adetayo, Bashirat, Fiyin & Daanish went to Team Hex while Osade, Temitope, Abdul & Mojoyin went to Team Crest.
It turns out that names have power, and both teams learnt this in their own way. Team Crest moved at a breakneck pace, finishing builds in a matter of hours and having late night calls to discuss engineering notebook management. Team Hex on the other hand, seemed to be under a curse, perfectly functioning drivetrains would fall apart and more time was spent taking apart builds than actually creating them. It seemed inevitable at a point that most of the top five would come from Team Crest, but we later found out that Team Hex had the best drivers and programmer.
You might think it would be impossible to recognize each individual’s talents when we were split in two, but it only served to emphasize them. Team Hex would occasionally ask for help with builds from Temitope and Abdul, who were quickly known for their building prowess and odd designs. Everybody wanted their engineering notebooks to look like Osade’s, who knew how to bring people and resources together to share knowledge. If you wanted a photograph of what happened that day, Bashirat was your girl. Daanish was constantly cheered as he broke his record times when driving the robot around our self-made obstacle course. Mojoyin never damaged parts, even when everyone broke screws while tapping extrusions. Both teams always asked Adetayo for help when it came to programming. Fiyin was ridiculously precise in whatever builds he made. And it turns out that it’s easy to foster bonds when debating about why it’s your turn to use the nutdriver. It didn’t matter whether we were Team Crest or Team Hex, we became Team Nigeria.
"It doesn't matter whether we were Team Hex or Team Crest, we're all Team Nigeria"
Date: 3/06/2023
Summary:
On the 3rd of June, the FGC Team Nigeria 2023 commenced its tenth training. I came relatively early, about 20 minutes before 9, and set up the place. Once a lot more students and coaches came, we began to work. The task of the day was to build a working hanging mechanism that would be able to carry our robot up a certain height, so we got right to it.
In my team, we started by mounting a structure of extrusions at the back of our cascading lift (located at the front of the robot). We did that to provide our lift with further support since it would be carrying our really heavy robot. This structure took a while to erect.
We had our lunch break around the time we finished that. After that, we made a detachable hook at the topmost part of our lift to stay on whatever bar we were to hang on and roped it to a shaft moved by a motor. The point was for the hook to stay on a bar and lift up our robot once the motor controlling its rope reverses direction. We had to fix some minor problems along the way. For instance, we changed the shaft with the hook’s rope to a shorter one to prevent the longer one from bending.
By the time we were done working, it was well over 5 pm, our designated closing time. The coaches told us beforehand to tell our parents to call and confirm what time they should come to pick us up because they didn’t want to keep them waiting. I initially thought that that was some sort of empty threat meant to motivate us to work harder, but when I saw parents that came before 5 waiting for us to finish, I realized they actually serious. Regardless, we spent an additional hour, and around 6 pm, said our goodbyes, and went home.
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