So it’s been a while since we’ve posted, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on our duffs! No indeed, our workshop has been filling up with assorted springy poles, rulebooks, and robot parts, along with kids to put them together.

This season, the challenge involves “creating circuits” by placing cones over the aforementioned springy poles. If your cone is the one on top, you’ve claimed the “junction” and can count it as a connection point. Translating that to requirements was the first task. We spent the first couple of meetings throwing ideas around.

Because there are many ways to approach the basic problem of lifting and placing cones, the team decided to try more than one prototype. Zach set about designing an arm, which is a new assembly that the team hasn’t tackled before; while Isaac designed an improved slide/pulley lift based on the lessons that we learned last year.

We have shifted our coding practice over to Blocks, so that the entire team can work on the programs. Aleks has explored the “ExportToBlocks” functionality in the FTC codebase, changing over our instance-based classes for our assemblies into static, global members so that it can be used from Blocks OpModes.

We are always open to new members – there is plenty left to accomplish! So if you’re interested in joining our team, drop us a line or talk to Isaac, Takoda, Aleks, or Zach at school.