Author Archives: Chown Dawg

World Science Festival

The Northern Bites were recently invited to the World Science Festival at NYU in NYC. We did some demoes and some hands-on activities with kids. It was a lot of fun. The crowds grew throughout the day until at the last demo of the day we actually ran into problems. Parents were fighting with parents over who should be where so that their kids could see the show. It got bad enough that the organizers had us stop the demo early because they were afraid for the safety of the kids up front. Sort of like being at a Who concert in the 1970s except with robots.

On stage at the WSF.

Where we started

Here’s a blast from the past. An image of our first U.S. Open in 2005 in Atlanta. Greydon Foil (who wrote the entire code base) is in the foreground and Bowdoin alum Doug Vail is on the right (he was on the CMU team at this time). Things looked a little different back then.

Northern Bites Take 3rd at U.S. Open

We finished off the weekend by defeating Texas 1-0 to finish in 3rd after losing a nail biter 1-0 to Penn in the semi-final. Penn ended up winning the championship with a win over Miami. The close scored show just how evenly matched the teams were. Ultimately Penn probably deserved to win because they had one area where they were clearly superior to the other teams – their motion kick was spectacular. As for us, we improved a lot over the weekend, identified areas for improvement, and should be one of the top teams going into Brazil.

We will be posting videos over the course of the next few days