January 7th is the Kickoff of The 26th FRC! (FIRST Robotics Competition)
What you never heard of this before? Well, let's begin with kick off.
On the kick off day, all the robotics teams find out what that year's competition is and get their kit of parts.
You see every year it's a new game and each team has to build a robot from scratch that doesn't weigh over 120 pounds and can accomplish at least one of the tasks in the game, and each team only has 6 weeks to plan strategy and build their robot. We find out all the other rules at kick off when the rule book is released.
The kit of parts only gives teams the basic stuff needed to make a robot. Most everything on the Robot has to be bought or made, and there is a budget for how much can be spent on the parts.
Oh, I almost forgot! All Teams get to find out what the game is at the same time, and there are teams all over the world. There are around 2682 teams in the US alone! There are around 206 teams in Canada, 62 in Israel, 53 in Mexico and 52 in Australia. The list goes on. If you want a full list of the Countries represented in FRC look it up on Wikipedia. Anyway, this year kick-off is January 7th at 8:00 am PST. All we know for certain (as of before kick off) is that the game is called SteamWorks and that it's Steampunk themed. We know this from a teaser video that was released by FIRST.
At Robotics competitions every team has their own 10ft by 10ft pit where they store their robot, change the bumpers to the right alliance color and work on it in between rounds in the event something goes wrong. Sometimes you have 20 minutes to fix your bot sometimes you have 5. Teams also have
robot sometimes you have 5. Teams also have mascots and give away free buttons to spectators and people from other teams. Unlike most sports all the teams help each other, showing Gracious Professionalism instead of bashing each other. Like if a team needs something to repair their robot other teams will lend a hand if of course, they have the thing that is needed.
In the PNW District system, once build season (the 6 week previously mentioned) is over teams get to go to two regional competitions.
In each round, 3 teams form an alliance. There is the red alliance and the blue alliance. In the qualification rounds, teams don't get to choose who they are allied with. So you could be on the same team one round and go against each other the next.
Once the qualification rounds are over the top 8 teams get to be alliance captains and choose two teams to be in their alliance. If (and this is usually the case) The team that ranked 1st chooses the team that ranked 2nd and the 2nd place team accepts then the team in 9th place gets to be an alliance captain and so on. From this point on alliances stay as the same group of teams every round. Quarterfinals will bring it to 8 alliances, Semifinals 4, and Finals 2.
Then there is the award ceremony. Awards give your team points toward making it on to the District Qualifying Competitions.
Order of competitions:
Regional
District Qualifying
District Championships
Championship
IT'S ROBOTICS SEASON!!
Article by Naiomi