FRC 2012 Game Rebound Rumble - The Year Minds Change

If you had a full night of sleep last night, you are not likely involved in the FIRST Robotics Competition. This year's build season is underway with Rebound Rumble and as always the game designers did a great job sparking innovation and coopertition. Check out the video below for a quick overview of the game:

Robotics has a cult like following with teams staying up late into the night for weeks on end to create the best robot while learning skills and gaining knowledge usually withheld until university and beyond. Students have just a few short weeks to create robots capable moving across a field and accurately launching basketballs into a hoop, a feat overwhelming even without time, money, and engineering constraints.

For over 20 years, robotics has made a positive and powerful impact on students and the engineering community, but the wrong lesson to take from this is that we should have robotics teams in every school and require engineering for everyone. Sure, I would love to see a team in every school so the opportunity is open to people who want it, but top down standardization would kill the spirit and fun. Robotics' appeal comes from its grassroots underground and playful nature.

I claim 2012 to be the year "minds change" because I believe the momentum has come to a head with all of the opportunities for students to learn and society's perception of their potential. Those who watched the kickoff event saw engineers, CEOs, celebrities, presidents and more come out to support the students. What the world is realizing is, students are capable of doing anything with the right resources and motivation. Educators are determined to give their students more than a lecture and a worksheet. Robots are a great example of this, but students are having an impact in every aspect of society.

Go to a robotics competition and be inspired and hooked. Mentor a robotics team or any program that fits your passions. There is nothing like an after school program to change a student's life.

To all of the teams out there competiting: good luck, have fun, and remember the learning is the prize!

To the mentors: may your coffee cups be full, your pizza be plentiful, and your joy abundant!

To everyone else, go find a team and check out the amazing work being done at schools all over the world!


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The World Was Inspired at The FIRST World Championship in St Louis

What an amazing end to this year's FIRST Robotics Competition! Teams of Students receive the game at Kickoff and then have 6 weeks to design, build, and program a robot from scratch. Then the robots are shipped to the regional competitions to play against other teams to win the most points and demonstrate how they have inspired other students to pursue STEM careers. Those who exceed expectations are awarded the opportunity to go to the FRC World Championship in St. Louis, Missouri.

This year's FIRST World Championship, was an exceptional year. In the 20th year of FIRST, the surge in the number of teams being started and schools seeing the transformative power of this program is incredible by all standards. There were students in all grades: K-3 in Junior FIRST Lego League, Middle Schoolers in FLL, and finally the High School students participating in FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition.

Each of these competitions have their own games and their own unique culture, and being able to be at World Championship and walk through each of them really fills you with awe to see so many students excited to learn and help each other.

FIRST Starts a College Division
For years, students have learned CAD, JAVA programming, machine shop practices, business and marketing skills and then it ended when they graduated high school. Of course some colleges had their own programs but now FIRST can be open to every college student. Not only this, but FIRST is perfect for the culture and spirit of University Sports where the entire school turns out to support their athletes. Now everyone can participate and/or support the learning that is going to change the world.

What is this new college program? It's called CARD or Collegiate Aerial Robotics Demonstration. That's right these robots are flying!

The game is called All Your Base (hooray Geeks!) and is played essentially like a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Students were allowed to choose their microcontroller and most of them picked...Arduino of course! For its cost, relative ease, and large amount of community support, it was perfectly fitting for the FIRST principle of Coopertition and support.

With 352 teams for the FRC program, there is no doubt of how quickly this is catching on around the world. I get skeptical looks when I tell my students and others about how exciting these events can be, but with thousands watching live and online, there is no doubt of the excitement and feasibility of this catching on mainstream.

Friday evening, we were treated to a special performance by Will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas. Will.i.am's appointment as "Director of Creative Innovation" at Intel has allowed him to proclaim a synergy of technology and artists. At this year's FIRST Kickoff he stood there next to Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers to get us pumped up for this season. Friday's performance was recorded to air on August 14th at 7pm on ABC as a showcase of FIRST and the Black Eyed Peas. 

Kamen, shared a conversation between himself and Will.i.am before Kickoff where he asked if he was going to help make FIRST cool. Will.i.am replied, "I can't make it cool, it already is. I want to make it loud!" With releases like The New Cool and ever increasing opportunities for students to participate, the culture is shifting and we will see a shift towards celebrating STEM as we do with music and sports.

A fact shared with us Saturday night, if FIRST grows as much in the second 20 years as it did in the first, we will have over 150,000 teams by 2031. Will you be one of those teams? 

I hope to see you and your team next year at a FIRST or VEX regional. Feel free to leave your World Championship experience in the comments, or describe how robotics has impacted your community/life.

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Chaos Vortex Experience at the FRC San Diego Regional Part 2

Wow, is all I can say, and I am not referring to the exhaustion or excitement of FRC. I am referring to the amazing things that my robotics students, Chaos Vortex/Team 3477 achieved this weekend. After a very long inspection process, my students did not get the driver practice they were hoping for. However, it was excellent for them to see how important attention to detail really is.

The following day (Friday) had one surprise after another. With its mechanism not fully functional and untested, the drive team decided to focus on blocking. This was a strategy that worked really well for us as a VEX team last year and many teams fail to see the importance of this. FRC has three teams on each alliance and if you can get one robot to score well for your side while one or two of the other robots block and prevent scoring for the other side, you can really control the game.

This was proven by the fact that our team was ranked in the top 10 for the entire competition out of 60. Our rookie team was blown away to find out that they were even in 1st place for an hour or so.

San Diego Regional is a high visibility event bringing incredible veteran teams like Spyder, Cheesy Poofs, and even our sister school's team the Holy Cows. We had a great time learning and seeing what other teams were doing both with their robots but also to spread the message of FIRST and STEM.

Friday afternoon, Jim Beck the Western Regional Coordinator for FIRST came to our booth. He said, "I keep hearing from the judges and the other teams about this rookie team Chaos Vortex, so I came to see it for myself." Our robotics President and our head of Finance spoke to him for a good amount of time. Soon after he came back with a camera crew from Time Warner Cable/Connect a Million Minds and said that the team was going to be recorded for a piece about FIRST Robotics!

Now everyone on our team was smiling ear to ear, and whats more we got our mechanism working so we were capable of scoring points. Other teams were coming to our booth asking to be on our alliance which was a new experience for us as we are not used to being asked, we are usually doing the asking. We were able to secure Team 1717 Dos Pueblos Engineering and Team 2102 Paradox onto our alliance making us a very formidable opponent. We made it all the way to the Semi-Finals which was exciting and I loved seeing our team go head to head with Team 254 Cheesy Poofs, a team that we respect greatly.

As the awards were being handed out, our small 15 person FRC team was proud of all they accomplished, but just when we thought that our day was done, we received the Rookie All Star award and the Highest Seed Rookie Award. We heard the stadium erupt with applause and recognition because each team had seen and commented on the gracious professionalism and coopertition that Chaos Vortex had at the competition. So now we are preparing for World Championship in St Louis in a little more than a month. There is so much to do but we are so grateful to be honored for the hard work put in this year.

Thank you to the teams, judges, and admin who made this regional one to always remember. My students have been transformed and are so passionate/motivated about STEM and their futures as only FIRST and robotics can. If you have any questions about starting an FIRST or VEX team please let me know.

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FRC San Diego Regional Rookie Team Experience Part 1

To quote my sophomore programmer, "Today was an educational experience." I couldn't have put it better myself.

The excitement grew as all of the teams entered the Valley View Casino Arena (formerly the San Diego Sports Arena) and as we opened our robot crate, it was like seeing an old friend. Having spent over 100 hours working on it, it was so wonderful to find out that our robot had safely made it. Other teams weren't as lucky.

We tightened up all of the screws and added the winch that we had designed to compensate for the extra torque when the robot is coming back up. It worked beautifully! Now all that was needed was to pass inspection, we would be driving in an hour or so, or so we thought.

We go up to the inspection booth only to find out that our weight was 4 pounds over. Now for one who is not familiar with FRC, 4 pounds may not sound like much but when everything you put on the robot was essential at one time, making the decision what to drill holes in or take off is aggravating. We had already decided to not deploy the minibot simply because we felt it was more important to replace it with the winch. While this may not have been the best game playing strategy, I made that call because it was more important to me that this team had a working big robot.

In the mean time, our team received safety pins, which are the judges way of saying good job. We found some of our old friends like team Spyder, the Holy Cows, and Hilltop's EPIC. They helped us out tremendously, and in turn we were able to help out other teams by lending tools, parts, and knowledge. That is what Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers refer to when they speak of Coopertition and Gracious Professionalism and some of my students for which this was their first robotics event kept commenting on how nice and awesome everyone was.

The team became a little stressed as the hours ticked by and they had an issue with their cRio's (robot brain) firmware, and bumpers but they kept each other calm and ended up passing every part of inspection with the exception of the bumpers (which were fixed by a student after another long night of working last night). The team kept getting complements on their marketing materials, people were excited to come take pictures of our robot and see it shoot out tubes, but we ran out of buttons way too fast and so we will be making them throughout the day.

Even though the official build season was over, our team learned a lot. Our programmer learned how to download the code much faster, saving us hours of time collectively, our team became experts in drilling holes, and while it sounds cliche the team became even closer than they already were. They keep talking about how they are always going to keep in touch and having fun. Keep in mind these are students from all grade levels and different social circles. That is one of my favorite things about robotics is how it brings people together to have fun and make something awesome!

I will post updates about the team during the Week in Review and you can follow us on @ChaosVortex. Onto day 2 of 3! I hope the team as an equally awesome day (perhaps a little less stressful)!

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FRC Ship Day! San Diego Regional Here We Come

Well it was a long weekend for everyone but we are finished and I am happy to present to you Team 3477 Chaos Vortex's Rookie Robot General Disarray!

The name of the robot has a dual meaning. First with the name Chaos Vortex we have decided to make our mascot Professor Chaos from South Park and his sidekick is named General Disarray. The second reason is to honor the man who made our robotics team possible, Ray Trinidad. He is our school's dean of students and found the funding for it to start. He is also a huge perpetrator of puns and so we thought that the play on words would further honor him.

Unlike many other robots we have seen, we decided to go with a robot that picked up the tubes from the inside as opposed to a claw from the outside. We also have a camera that provides a first person view of the field. We hope this will provide a better view of the field since the tubes will obscure the driver's vision.

It being our rookie year we decided to go for the low goals but the medium goals are a possibility. We are going to work on the height and tension of the bands when we actually get onto a field on March 10th.

We wanted to make sure that we built a great robot but however it does at competition, the students learned so much. They can honestly say that they have built a robot from scratch. One of my sophomores learned LabView programming which will benefit him next year but also with potential future employers who use it (e.g. Disney, LAPD Bomb Squad, Qualcomm, and many other prominent engineering firms). Others are learning Autodesk CAD, welding, soldering, and various power tools. I wouldn't trade that for any award in the world.

In other exciting robot news, we learned that our team is now sponsored by General Dynamics! I could not be more grateful to one of our mentors Nate, for helping us secure this support as well as being here throughout the season. We could not have done this without him. The support from our other mentor Mike was also much appreciated for his machine shop and expertise.

If you are in the South County in San Diego you might have caught that our team was featured on the front page of the Union Tribune (another picture). Such a wonderful memento for my students to honor their hard work. Our team is working very hard to make sure that robotics becomes equally popular to sports and it was nice to have that recognized.

While the late nights have stopped, the work continues with preparing the marketing materials, programming, working on the minibot and the other 30lbs of parts we were allowed to withhold. Just a couple of quick weeks until the competition and we can see how General Disarray and Chaos Vortex does!

If you would like to follow our robotics team check out the Chaos Vortex Facebook page and @ChaosVortex on Twitter.

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FRC Team Chaos Vortex Week 6 Update

This is it! Zero week is here. The designs are set, the robots are driving, hopes are high, and sleep is low. In this final week the FRC gremlins come out and things start going wrong. We had planned to be finished a week and a half ago but parts and designs don't always turn out like you want them to.

Next year we will use Autodesk CAD to make a more detailed drawing. However, with such a new team and no engineering class previously, the learning curve for the students was too steep. I love refinement and the fact that we have an entire year to get better just makes me smile from ear to ear.

We, like all of the other teams are going to work through the weekend. It will be a lot of work but this season has brought these students closer together than ever. Long days are no fun in the moment but make great memories and FRC tends to make lifelong friendships out of teammates.

Our team received a mysterious donation from Otay Land, we did not ask them directly but we are grateful that they have made a commitment to supporting these students.

I feel like I am rambling so I'll stop, and while there is a lot to say and be proud of (working mechanism, minibot, and drivetrain) there is still much to do.

The robot ships on Monday! I look forward to showing you what we can do.

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