Snap goes the time by Richard

Snap goes the time by Richard - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

"Snap," "there goes the arm of our machine," Jose says. "Now how are we supposed to win?" I say. Before I continue, let me take u back some. Me and my friend Jose and paul disided to team up to win this LEGO Olympiad competition. The goal was to make a LEGO machine that can do tasks like lifting, moving, and pulling things to complete tasks. The person with the most points at the end wins. So while my friends and I were testing under a time crunch, we had to look around to see what was wrong. So my friends and I had basically taken apart the whole thing, trying to look for what was wrong. We figured out that the issue was that the arm was broken. The arm was broken because we had used too much power in the engine for the arm, causing the arm to get loose and break. So we had to go into the settings of our machine, the engine, and lower the speed of how it moves; that way it doesn't snap off. There was like barely any time, but eventually we were able to fix it in time and the race began. We had to do task after task after task. And eventually they said time was up, calculated all our points and we learned that we only got second place. But it was good enough for us. I learned that you must always double or even triple-check when building/designing something.