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29 March 2020
The FIRST Robotics Competition season may have suspended, but that does not stop our team from continuing our work. Expanded Outreach We launched FRCTutorials.com this month and have been working on lessons. There are several lessons already posted. We hope to share our lessons from our first season to make...
01 March 2020
This weekend we competed at Miami Valley Regional (MVR) which we spent six weeks preparing for. All of our hard work paid off. We won the Rookie All-Star award and are now moving on to the World Championship in Detroit, Michigan! We were very happy with the way that our...
17 February 2020
More than three fourths of our FIRST Robotics Competition team (team members and mentors) have FIRST LEGO League experience. 2020 is our rookie season as a FIRST Robotics Competition Team. We believe that our background in FIRST LEGO League makes us a stronger team. FIRST LEGO League was a fantastic...
08 February 2020
This week our team made significant progress on our robot. Thanks to an extra snow day, some of our team members were able to put in an additional work day and get started early on Friday. We designed a sliding ramp over the electronics to both protect the electronics, but...
01 February 2020
This week’s work sessions were very successful. The main focus for these work sessions was to take the hanger prototype to the next level and to reinforce the side supports of our robot. We started to convert our wooden prototype into a metal one. This also included installating a NEO...
25 January 2020
This week’s work sessions have been extremely productive. A team parent helped us build a field element - the Shield Generator! We now have a field element that we can use to practice with, and test our hanging mechanism on. It really helped us get a good visualization of what...
18 January 2020
This week our team made a lot of progress on our robot. We began by taking apart our off-season robot to reclaim useful parts to use this season. The lift we used at MVRC has long metal beams that we can reuse to build something new. Last week, we had...
10 January 2020
Season Kickoff was all about using what we already know to brainstorm something that has potential to be great. To begin, we attended the season kickoff event at Penn State Greater Allegheny. Here we learned about the challenge for the 2020 season Infinite Recharge. We had a BLAST at the...
14 December 2019
On December 14, two of our students and two of our mentors represented the team at the District FIRST LEGO League tournament at University of Akron. We enjoyed being judges and assistant judges and being able to make a difference in the larger FIRST community. We also had the additional...
08 December 2019
Earlier in the year, we had been selected to be one of the beta testers for the new FRC 2020 Control System. We were greatly honored to be selected despite being a rookie team. On December 8, we ran a workshop for Steel City Robotics Alliance (SCRA) teams. During the...
07 December 2019
On December 7, our team hosted a FIRST LEGO League tournament in Lawrenceville, PA. The local Boys and Girls Club let us use their space for the event. We had 22 teams registered to partcipate at the event. We converted the Senior Center into Pit areas and the main gym...
23 November 2019
On November 23rd, we went to Austintown, OH to help FRC 3193 with their FIRST LEGO League Qualifier. It was a great day! Four students and two adults from our team volunteered at this event. The adults judged, while the rest of us helped with the robot game. Two of...
29 October 2019
Since MVRC, our team has been working on developing new skills. Through the course of building an offseason robot, we realized how important our robot’s CAD drawing was to the team. It was essentially our build instructions. It is how we determined what length to cut beams and how to...
11 October 2019
Emily Brittain Elementary School is a small K-4 school in Butler, PA with about 250 students. The population served by the school has the highest poverty rates of the district. We were invited by the school principal to be part of their Fun Fall Festival on October 11. Four of...
27 September 2019
On September 27, 2019, we were finally assigned a team number. During our seven years in FIRST LEGO League, we were Team 8024, 74, 91 and 51. Now, we are back to the 8000’s as a rookie FIRST Robotics Competition team. We are also registered for events. Look out for...
21 September 2019
On Saturday, September 21, the team went to the MVRC (Mahoning Valley Robotics Competition) off season event at Warren G. Harding High School for our first ever FIRST Robotics Competition experience. We built and programmed our robot in just six weekends. The Night Before We arrived at Warren G. Harding...
20 September 2019
On Friday, September 20, the evening before our first event, we held a community open house at Penn State Shenango. This open house was for our primary sponsor, as well as members of the Sharon community. It was also an opportunity for parents and guardians to see what their children...
31 August 2019
It’s alive! We finally connected the electronics and tried to run the robot to make sure everything is working before continuing. Of course, we discovered a few mistakes in the process too. No weekend is complete without several attitional trips to the local hardware store in Sharon! By the end...
25 August 2019
Mistakes are the way we learn Building a FIRST Robotics Competition robot is not easy. Every team meeting has been incredibly productive, but it still takes time (especially when you are a rookie). We make a lot of mistakes and have to redo a lot of work. For instance, the...
17 August 2019
Carnegie Science Center We spent the entire day at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA spreading FIRST to the community. The museum was hosting a special H2Oh! day where students learn all about water. We decided to bring a FIRST LEGO League Hydro Dynamics challenge set and let students...
16 August 2019
MVRC We set a goal for ourselves. We want to build and program a robot and compete at the 2019 Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge! We have registered as pre-rookie team # 9998! At our first meeting in our new space, we went over goals for the off-season event. We went...
10 August 2019
We have a home On Saturday, August 10, we moved into our new home. We are extremely thankful for the generosity and support of Penn State Shenango for providing us our meeting space! We have been given a part of a small classroom (used as a store room). It’s a...
10 August 2019
MVRC We set a goal for ourselves. We want to build and program a robot and compete at the 2019 Mahoning Valley Robotics Challenge! We have registered as pre-rookie team # 9998! At our first meeting in our new space, we went over goals for the off-season event. We went...
03 August 2019
Team Logo We received our first team shirt. We don’t have a team number yet. The gears in our logo will eventually have a number added to them by the end of the year. The rebel alliance logo represents both our Star Wars-themed name and an alliance between multiple FIRST...
03 August 2019
FIRST LEGO League Kickoff On Saturday, August 3rd, our team hosted a kickoff for the new First LEGO League challenge and season at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). This is the sixth year in a row that we have organized and hosted the event. Our team members also spend over 40...
27 July 2019
Fayette County Fair The Fayette County Fair is an annual 10-day event in rural Pennsylvania that attracts 90,000 visitors. There are food vendors, games, rides, poultry, goats, sheep, cows…and robots! We were invited to spend the day in the 4-H Educational Building at the event. This was an opportunity to...
20 July 2019
Everyone Learns Everything We took our robot design idea from the previous meeting and broke it up into five main sections. Each group of two worked on writing up and designing that part of the robot. Everyone took part, even the programmers. Just like when we were in FIRST LEGO...
14 July 2019
FIRST Outreach Half our team (Ramsey, Ben, Lucas, Sanjay and Arvind) spent Saturday, November 13, at Mountain State Invitational where we taught workshops and ran an Expert Zone area for teams attending Mountain State Invitational (MSI). MSI is an international FIRST LEGO League Open Invitational for 62 teams from North...
06 July 2019
Strategy and Design First we came up with a strategy as a team. What do we want to accomplish in sandstorm? What should the robot be able to do? We broke up into smaller groups and did brainstorming to figure out what our robot design will be like to hold...
22 June 2019
Safety FIRST - Robot Second Unfortunately, while cutting a zip-tie, one of our team members cut his finger accidently with a pair of scissors. Luckily, some of our team members came to the rescue with some Peppa Pig band-aids. Our new team motto is “Safety FIRST - Robot Second”. Outreach...
14 June 2019
Coopertition We were very excited to meet FIRST Senior Mentor, Andy Yantes, and students from FRC 3193 Falco Techs at our second meeting. They inspected our robot for us and gave us lots of great advice. They recommended that our robot should be long-shaped and gave us a thumbs up...
08 June 2019
Get to know each other We began with introductions. Many of us knew each other from previous FIRST LEGO League competitions, but many of us didn’t. It is important for everyone on the team to learn each other’s names and understand why we are in FIRST. Before the first meeting,...
04 May 2019
Not the Droids You are Looking For began in 2011 as a FIRST LEGO League team. The team won a Champion’s Award and a Robot Performance Award every year of competing. Highlights include winning the Champion’s Award at Razorback Invitational, Coach Award at World Festival and Champion’s Award at World...