2010 Season
Competitions: Portland FRC Regional, Seattle FRC Regional
Rankings: OR 43rd of 60, WA-TBA
Awards: TBA
Already off to a better start. Had several planning meetings and already have officers in place and a better way to implement the team business plan. Planning many improvements for the upcoming season. Also can't wait to see our new school facilities!
Were asked to participate in the Lynnwood 4th of July parade by the city! (they saw our business plan online) Did a quick fix-up on Roy, and those team members that could, marched along firing confetti bombs from the cannons. The crowd loved it! We also did a presentation for Boeing Family days.
The new school is pretty cool! We brought our robots to the Royal Rallies where each class got to tour the school. It was fun driving them around the Agora. Lots of students and visitors liked to play 'catch' with Prince John (our 2009 FRC bot). They also liked to see King Louie (our 2009 FTC bot) 'attack' the bigger robots. We had several students brave enough to try driving the robots. Hope it will help a little with our recruiting and also make us a little better known in the school!
Held our annual dinner auction fundraiser in October. We gave tours of the new school and had our Pit put up with robots running. People enjoyed watching the robots. Our Coach, Brad, was part of the auction - to get a pie in the face. Unfortunately, we forgot to bring the pie, so we improvised and he got a plate of spaghetti in the face!
Developed a team training program. We felt we needed more members trained on both Inventor and Labview BEFORE we start the build. Our Tech skills team put together a Mini Golf challenge where our members learn Inventor, design an NXT robot with it, build that bot, learn Labview, program their bot, then compete on a six hole course. Our two alumni, Taylor and Erika, were our judges. The competition went very well, with each team earning awards in excellence. Connor B was surprised to get the Applied Learning award.
We and MTHS co-hosted an FLL Regional in December at our new school. Both of the FLL teams that we helped tutor attended. One earned the teamwork award. Nearly every member was able to volunteer. It went really well, got lots of compliments. Long Day, but fun. We may just do it again next year.
build Season is under way. We are having the typical ups and downs. Design went smoothly and the basic drive frame went quick, but then came the kicker. We prototyped several different mechanical designs, but none of them had the power we wanted to loft the ball. Then we found inspiration on Youtube (thank you to all the teams that posted their successes) where a video showed a pneumatic kicker, we decided to try it. The prototype worked great! So we put it on the robot and had all kinds of glitches. Just when we got it working, we tried to add our "Ball Magnet" (a roller to keep ball) and everything had to be moved or redone to make it fit and work together. Meanwhile, we are prototyping different lifter ideas, and we are down to our final week! That's the build season, fast, furious, frustrating and fun.
Oregon regional was pretty good. No awards, but got lots of positive comments from judges and others about our pit, our team organization, our safety program and how positive we were when working together. We are getting a reputation as a good team that's going places. Not bad at all.