The first FRC competition was held in a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire in 1992 with twenty-eight competing teams to give students a chance to experiment with STEM related areas. FIRST Robotics Competition, also known as FRC, makes STEM fun for all students, having different programs: FIRST Lego, FIRST Tech Challenge and the high school level FIRST Robotics Competitions.
Robotics is a huge hands-on activity that teaches students how to work with each other and make a robot to represent their group.
As of now, the Sterling’s robotics team is designing the pits and conjuring a plan to keep the pits organized and spacious. The Sterling robotics team—the Golden Bots—have recently begun the process of making travel cases for tools and materials for when they travel for competitions, making traveling easier and compact.
The pits are a 10 x 10 x 10 area for each competing robotics team to work on their robots during the competition. The pits main use is to act as a workshop to fix the robot when or if the robot breaks or needs minor tweaks in between matches.
The competitions follow a different theme each year, with the theme being presented in the first week of January. Each game usually consists of the robot performing a series of actions. These could be shooting a ball or disc into a basket or on a pole, doing defense, placing an item on/in something and at the end, climbing a structure.
Competitions last about three-four days out of a week, one day of practice and two-three days of actual competition. Each team works to set up their pit and get their robots ready for competition. During the start of the competition, each team is examined to make sure they follow the rules that were shared with each team, giving requirements to be a certain weight, price, and be safety checked.
Senior Kimberly Vazquez, who is the administrator of the team, has shared how through the process of making the pit, she disclosed that “there is a lot of aluminum being used to give more structure.” Most of the travel case is built with a type of wood, making aluminum mandatory to hold up hundreds of pounds of tools and storage.
New member, senior Phelix Cervantez, explained the process of making the pits too, sharing, “I’ve done a lot of the actual cutting and figuring out what needs to be done.”
Each member covers their part to get this project done, each putting great effort into everything. Once the project is done, the Golden Bots will get to deconstruct their last year robot and get to brainstorming for the new upcoming theme.
