Hello!

From June 8th to June 18th, I will be in New Orleans, Louisiana once again! This summer, I will be working with Mission Love Never Fails. This is a missions organization that brings down mission groups from all over the U.S. to minister to the people of New Orleans as we help rebuild from Hurricane Katrina. For this week, I will be working with a group of 40 students from Brandon, Florida. We will be working at two job sites, one building a house with Habitat for Humanity and the other working on a local home owners home. These first few days have been mostly used for preperation for next week. I will try my best to update this often on what we are doing, prayer requests, etc. See you soon!

-Spencer

Ok, so we had a tough week with both of our challenges. The awards ceremony was incredible, but we didn’t place in the top ten. We tied with another team for 15th place out of 43 highschool robot-building teams from around the world. Better than I expected. Not bad for our first year at Globals! I can now offically talk about our instant challenges from this year, but I’m too tired. ;-)

It has been a great year of DI! The furthest we’ve ever gone! It’s been an amazing week! We will hopefully be able to do it next year, which would be our last year. I am so ready for it already! I just want to read our challenge, and solve it at a global level. I’m getting excited already!

Like I said, I’m tired. It’s been a busy week! Goodnight!

-Spencer

Hey! You can watch the Global Finals Awards Ceremony online at globalfinals.com at 6:30 central! Be listening for “Meadowdale Christian Academy” for the Challege “B: DI-Bot - Secondry Level!” Hopefully you’ll see us!

-Spencer

Today was awesome! We started out our day with breakfast and a team devotional. We practiced some instant challenges (and did awesome at them!), then headed to the convention center to hang out. We went bowling, then headed to our site for our instant challenge. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to talk anything about it until after the Global Finals Award Ceremony. I’ll talk more then!

Club DI: Midnight Madness was an outdoor concert with the band, MAE. It involved high schoolers and college students, crowd surfing, pizza and drinks, lots of glow sticks, and staying up til midnight! It was a whole lot of fun!

Tomorrow (Saturday) we have the awards ceremony! I’ll post some more info about that later today. See ya!

-Spencer

Today was amazing. We spent most of our morning preparing for our central challenge performance. We got to the storage area two hours before we needed to be there. We pre-set everything, tested stuff, practiced our lines and song, and everything worked great. We were so ready to present our solution to the appraisers and audience. While in there, the robot was working better than ever, but when we walked into the performance room loading bay, the most important part of the robot, a piece of fishing line holding up a stirring arm, snapped. We don’t know how or why. We were all stressed and just trying our best to recover. An instant challenge surfaced in the midst of our central challenge, and we had a very small amount of time to figure out what to do. We performed our skit with a few flaws, but mostly good. The judges seemed impressed with our robot even though it didn’t work the way we wanted it to. No matter what would happen about it, God’s will was done and I wouldn’t have it any other way! After we took everything out, we enjoyed destroying our backdrop and props with hammers, fists, and kicks. We received our scores a few hours later. There were a few things we didn’t agree with, and a few things we liked, the robot being one of them! Even though it messed up, the judges saw past that and graded us on how it should have worked. Thank you Jesus!

Tonight, our team went to the Box & Ball costume party dressed in crazy D.I. costumes! Most of us used duct tape to create out costumes! Wesley used a trashbag to make a tux, and Jordan used M&M and Skittles candy wrapers to create his pants. We had an awesome night of live music and dancing! It was great!

Tomorrow is the 3M non-competitive challenge, Club DI: Midnight Madness, and our second part of the competiton, the Instant Challenge. This is a make it or break it challenge, so please pray for us! Let God’s will be done!

-Spencer

Hello! Okay, today was a pretty awesome day. Our team is offically registered for Global Finals. We had the opening cermony tonight which was pretty much amazing. It started with representatives from all states/counties entering in a parade onto the floor (our rep was Jordan!). It was awesome to see all of the different countries involved in D.I. South Korea, China, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, USA, Brazil, and many more! There were sponsors, contest winners, and incredible people recognized next. After that, a slide show of pics and videos was played on the big screen while the band MAE played on the main stage. A lazer show ended it out. It was really cool!

Tomorrow, we have our central challenge at 12:30 Eastern (11:30 Central). We did some tests and touch ups tonight, and we are ready! Please pray for us!

That’s it for tonight. Goodnight from Tennessee!

-Spencer