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Back from the summer! What's up with our team?
- ftc18094bbni
- Sep 12, 2021
- 4 min read
Hey! It's been so long since I've written about what's actually been happening on the team; this is so exciting! We hope you all found the blog series that we did over the summer to be interesting or useful or maybe even a little of both. We'll continue posting the blog every week, but now that we're getting close to the start of the 2021-2022 season, the blog will show what our team is doing. We share all of our ups and downs of FTC so that you can be inspired to participate in FTC or robotics or STEM if you aren't already, and if you are already STEM and robotics to the core, we want to show you our experience and share the positive (and sometimes negative) that we all encounter in FTC. I am so excited to let you know what's been happening since we went to state last year, so I'm just going to get down to it!
If you've been reading the blog since last year, you know we went to the Alamodome in June to compete in the Texas Cup UIL State Competition. This was, in my opinion at least, the highlight of the season last year. There is no way to express how happy and exciting and wonderful the experience was for us. Check out the following blog posts if you want to know more about what happened at state tournament:
Since state, though, all that you've seen on the blog was our summer series on tips for starting a new team (I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't already). But we've been doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes. To be honest, you probably don't want to hear about all of it. Most of it has been us getting everyone in the right communication platforms and starting the engineering notebook, and I am almost positive you don't want a whole blog about how we changed the font and colors in the notebook, because that's about all we've been doing for most of the summer. These past four weeks or so have been a bit busier than formatting, and that's what we're going to recap in this blog, so you don't miss out on all the new info before we really launch back into telling you all about the team and our activities.
The first big news, and maybe the most exciting and important: WE HAVE 7 NEW TEAM MEMBERS!!!!!!This is huge for us. We only had 8 on our team last year, and we were all juniors and sophomores, but we are totally changing that up and it's so exciting. We spent a couple weeks this summer finding more students at our school who were interested in being on the team. There were so many people who told us they were interested and too many who would make a huge impact on the team. We maxed out our capacity on the team and have 7 newbies this season, and now we have team members from freshmen to seniors and, speaking on behalf of the whole team, it is so EXCITING to have a bigger team and more friends. Personally, I am still proud that we managed to keep the team 1/3 female. Last year, we were 1/2 girls, so we aren't doing as good, but I think the female representation is so important, that it doesn't matter because 1/3 is still a huge chunk. I realize that this probably isn't as exciting for you as it is for us, but it will impact our team more than anything else that has happened since the end of last season.
Now, onto the boring stuff. I'm going to try to keep it short, but this stuff might be interesting or important to some of you so I'm still gonna include it in this post. Firstly, we set up a lot of our engineering notebook including most of our team goals (not the ones that have to do with game strategy; kickoff is still to come!) and our about section of our notebook. I'm not going to explain exactly what we did because it's a LOT! But, a word of advice to other teams out there: get the stuff done over the summer that doesn't involve building the robot before FIRST does kickoff for the new season. That way you guys can focus more on building the robot instead of the notebook or organizing outreach or looking for sponsorships when you're pressed for time to finish your robot before matches start. Things like setting goals are so important for our team, so we worked on it early before we got too busy.
And...there's more stuff! Yep, we did a ton this summer, but I promise this stuff isn't as boring! We worked hard on our outreach planning over the past few weeks. We've started planning for a service project for our school that will hopefully start soon (fingers crossed!). We've also done a bit to launch our robotics club at our school that will start in the spring. We are really hoping for more people to join the club so we can share FIRST and STEM and get them excited about robotics. We will share more about our outreach as we start to become more active with it, but for now, it's mostly planning.
And now, for the most exciting news of the summer! Well, it hasn't happened yet, so it technically wasn't over the summer, but anyways....
FREIGHT FRENZY KICKOFF IS THIS WEEK!!!!!!!!
Aaaaah! It's so exciting to have a new season and game starting up. The even better news is that you can watch it, even if you aren't part of FTC. FIRST will be streaming the kickoff on YouTube, so anyone can watch. We'll let you know the basics regardless, even if you can't watch, so watch out for another blog post next weekend and maybe some thing on Instagram?!?! (remember to follow us @batteriesnotincludedftc)
If you'd like to watch the virtual kickoff on YouTube, click on the link below at 10:30 on Saturday, September 18th.
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