Joining Iron Reign

By Shaggy and Justin

The Transition from Imperial to Iron Reign

It all started when both teams went to the North Texas Regional - I was part of Imperial at the time, with high hopes for our robot. We worked really hard on the robot, though we were only a team of three, so all were eager to see the robot compete. But, once the matches started rolling, we saw we didn't have what it took to compete against power houses like Technical Difficulties.

This really made us feel bad because we had only worked on the robot game and not on any of the awards. At the end of the day, the Imperial team waited for the awards with our sister team, Iron Reign, because they worked really hard toward the awards. Sure enough, their hard work paid off because they were able to get the 2nd place Inspire award. They were heading to Supers. We all went out to celebrate their victory, some of us happier than others.

While everyone was talking, our mentor made us an interesting offer. He saw us put extreme effort into making a competetitive robot and, liking our work ethic, said "You guys are varsity material." So he decided to offer Justin and I a spot on Iron Reign to continue our adventures with robotics. We could not believe Iron Reign would be so generous as to take us in with open arms. We accepted right away because we couldn't pass up such an opportunity - our team hasn't been to Supers for years.

It came with conditions though: we had to start doing blog posts, which we had never done before, and our mentor wanted to see the same work ethic from when we worked on our Imperial robot. We were also given many opportunities here at Iron Reign. Since Iron Reign goes for all the awards, I have been able to learn what each award means and how to work towards getting them. We have also learned more on software and hardware. Tycho is an experienced coder and Austin is an experienced builder, both ready to teach anyone willing to get their hands dirty. These opportunities could not have been found anywhere except Iron Reign.