Zach, a 5-year veteran of the Manchester Machine Makers 4-H Club and FIRST Tech Challenge Team #16221 and a junior at Burr and Burton Academy in Manchester Vermont, was recognized at the Vermont State Championships held on Saturday March 7 at South Burlington High School in South Burlington, Vermont as one of two FIRST Tech Challenge Leadership Award Finalists representing Vermont.
This award is a significant recognition of Zach’s dedication and leadership on the team and for the FTC community. He and Miles Vernon were both recognized by the Manchester Machine Makers as Semi-Finalists. To be selected as a Finalist from across all teams in Vermont is an honor which can lead to future opportunities in STEAM.
Congratulations!
From FIRST: What is the FIRST® Leadership Award?
The FIRST® Leadership Award recognizes the dedication and individual contributions of outstanding secondary school students participating on FIRST® Tech Challenge or FIRST® Robotics Competition teams. Students in 10th or 11th grade are eligible to be nominated by their team for the FIRST Leadership Award for excelling in areas such as leadership, entrepreneurship, and dedication to advancing the mission of FIRST within their communities.
There are four (4) levels of the FIRST Leadership Award.
FIRST Leadership Award Semi-finalists – comprised of the two (2) students in their 10th or 11th school year* nominated by each team.
FIRST Leadership Award District Championship Semi-finalists (FIRST Robotics Competition only) – The students selected at District events to be interviewed at the District Championship for Finalist consideration.
FIRST Leadership Award Finalists – The students selected for each Regional and District Region.
FIRST Leadership Award Winners – comprised of the ten (10) FIRST Robotics Competition and ten (10) FIRST Tech Challenge students selected from the applicable FIRST Leadership Award Finalists.
The students who earn FIRST Leadership Award status as a Semi-finalist, Finalist or Winner, are great examples of student leaders who have led their teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission, champion FIRST Core Values such as Inclusion, and embody Gracious Professionalism®. It is the goal the FIRST Leadership Award Winners will continue, post-award, as great leaders, student alumni, and advocates of FIRST.
In 2019, the Woodie Flowers Memorial Grant was established for FIRST Leadership Award Winners pursuing STEAM fields of study.
The kickoff for FIRST: AGE – DECODE now seems an age ago! We’ve been through the exploratory builds, design and build of robot V1 (Jimmy Sheutron) and then the design, CAD, and build of robot V2.
Liam, Zach, Miles (and Ben in spirit) with their Inspire Award 3rd place trophy at Vermont Regional ChampionshipsZach, Miles, Ben, and Liam with their Inspire Award runner-up trophy at the Norwich Qualifier
December saw a change of plans – V1 had some design flaws which would limit its capabilities, no matter how many improvements we made. So the team made a mid-season choice to return to the drawing board for a completely new design. It included mechanisms that could theoretically accomplish every challenge the game offered.
V1 went with us to compete in the Bennington Qualifiers, which we helped host along with the Cookie Clickers and the Bennington Bolts & Biscuits. He was slow but steady, and did very well for us, earning a name (Jimmy Sheutron)! It was the first competition day where we didn’t need to fix things in a hurry between matches, which felt pretty remarkable. A couple of teams came from neighboring states, showing off a whole different level of competition than our low-key Vermont region usually experiences. So that Qualifier was a really useful day for our team, teaching us how to play the game and giving us a clearer idea of what the robot ought to be able to do.
Exhilarated from Bennington, the team threw themselves into a round of improvements on V2, while still learning to code and refine Jimmy. We just barely decided to take V2 to the Northfield Qualifier, hosted at Norwich University. Given its Work-In-Progress state, it was very impressive. It showed off its potential as our drivers improved with each match, being chosen as an alliance partner for the playoffs. Additionally, the team came home with a second place in the Inspire Award, which is a real honor.
Inspire Award Criteria
The team that receives this award is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and a role model FIRST team. This team is a top contender for many other judged awards and is a gracious competitor. The Inspire Award winner is an inspiration to other teams, acting with Gracious Professionalism® both on and off the playing FIELD. This team shares their experiences, enthusiasm, and knowledge with other teams, sponsors, their community, and the JUDGES. Working as a unit, this team will have shown success in performing the task of designing and building a ROBOT.
Team is able to describe, demonstrate, document, or display their experiences and knowledge to the JUDGES.
Team must submit a PORTFOLIO.
The Inspire Award celebrates the strongest qualities of all the judged awards. A team must be a strong contender for at least one award in each of the following judged award categories:
Machine, Creativity, and Innovation Awards,
Team Attributes Awards, and
Think Award
Team must be positive and inclusive, and each team member contribute to the success of the team.
Then, into the home stretch – with three weeks before the Vermont Regional Championships, and school vacation and travel, the team really put in the extra effort. They worked to refine the flywheel launcher, fabricate a lift mechanism, and tune RPMs vs. distance. Our chief code monkey wrote the Autonomous routine using both two-wheel + IMU odometry and the Limelight camera to localize with AprilTags. Our drivers practiced, and everyone pitched in to write an Engineering Portfolio that they could be proud of.
By the time the competition arrived, V2 could do everything reasonably well, and was a pretty interesting machine. It could intake artifacts (big wiffle balls) from anywhere on the field, drive with some nimbleness, index and sort the different colors of artifacts, recognize the AprilTag on the obelisk to determine which pattern to shoot; it could shoot three balls in pattern, in any order, or single balls of a specific color or any color. The drivers could set the flywheel to a near-target RPM or far-target RPM. The base was not so large that it would preclude any other robots from partially parking in the home base at the end of the game, allowing for a consistent full park + partial park score. It had a three-artifact autonomous routine that would also move appropriately, contributing to a Move Ranking Point in any match.
By midmorning, there were a great many “shoulder ducks” to be seen among other teams and volunteers as well, showing off our unique Manchester Machine Makers “got ducks?” style.
Qualifying rounds are always unpredictable, but the team gave a solid performance, ranking in the middle of the pack after five intense matches. V2 was easy to maintain, only needing fresh batteries between matches. With the code well-organized, we had the luxury of working on an enhanced autonomous during breaks without worry of breaking the main tele-op routine.
The judges were very busy throughout the competition and asked insightful questions, listening closely to the team as they explained everything from their brainstorming process to their outreach plans. With the careful documentation of V1 and V2, and obviously knowledgeable team members, the judges awarded third place in the Inspire Award to the team, out of 25 teams!
Topping it all off, our most senior member, Zachary Lindenberg,was selected as one of only two Finalists from Vermont for the FIRST Leadership Award.
FIRST Leadership Award
The FIRST® Leadership Award recognizes the dedication and individual contributions of outstanding secondary school students participating on FIRST® Tech Challenge or FIRST® Robotics Competition teams. Students in 10th or 11th grade are eligible to be nominated by their team for the FIRST Leadership Award for excelling in areas such as leadership, entrepreneurship, and dedication to advancing the mission of FIRST within their communities.
Everyone on the team was happy to see the competition season come to such a successful close. While we’re not planning to go to any further competitions, we are planning to participate in 4-H Communications Day on March 21st in Rutland. We’ll also have another Robotics Day at the Manchester Community Library, and we plan to bring a robotics activity to the State Fair late in the summer, before the next competition season begins.
Come see us at our events to acquire your very own rubber ducky to ride on your shoulder!
Join the Manchester Machine Makers at the Manchester Community Library on May 31, 1:00pm – 3:30pm for a Robotics Show & Share event!
Manchester Machine Makers (MMM), a 4-H sponsored FIRST® Tech Challenge team, is hosting a Robotics Meet-And-Greet for (Southern) Vermont at the Manchester Community Library. We will set up stations to teach people with all different levels of experience about the different aspects of robotics, including hardware (Building the robot) and software (Coding the robot). With a couple of basic robots, we can drive around the room.
Near the end of the event, people can share what they accomplished during the day and receive duckies for participating at a station. There will also be special ducks to earn, so give the day your all and have fun!
1:00 – 1:15 → Introducing the team
1:15 – 1:30 → Introducing the stations
1:30 – 2:45 → Stations
2:45 – 3:30 → Share achievements and receive duckies
As a 4-H club, MMM is open to all students grades 7-12 (ages 12-18) in the local area who are interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) and/or robotics. MMM invites anybody interested in STEAM to join us for the Show & Share and learn more about what is being done to promote STEAM education in our community. Join us as we explore the future.
We hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving, enjoying many good things. We certainly did! The Green Mountain Girls will be supporting us again this year; I encourage you to also support them as a great non-profit organization that helps fundraise for other local non-profit groups (including us, yay!)
The Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering has also provided us a grant to further outreach to the Greater Manchester community, with which we plan to design a robot “kit” to give hands-on experience during limited-time, casual workshops. After we finish building our competition robots, Cordelia and Cornelius and Thomas, we will use that experience along with the grant to put together some open house opportunities.
We have also been the beneficiary of several private donors – you know who you are, and thank you so very much!
All donations go 100% toward supporting our FIRST Tech Challenge program. All mentors and coaches are volunteers, and as we charge no membership fees, all of our funding comes from grants and donations.
This Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to the future of humankind. We are a club that teaches the next generation of innovators how to build robots and work with the technology of tomorrow, building robots out of repurposed Android devices. Help us shape the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries – donate to your local robotics club, the Manchester Machine Makers, today with PayPal here.
Good News! The robot is almost completed. The team is currently focusing on finishing the programming and polishing the pulley system. The team is still undecided on a name for the robot so far, but we are very hopeful for another great name. We can’t wait for the competition in February!
Some great news for our supporters as we begin the season of gratitude: the Manchester Machine Makers was recently the grateful recipient of a grant from the Green Mountain Girls, a local organization with a heart of gold!
The Green Mountain Girls is a volunteer organization that supports all the local charities in the area. We are incredibly honored to have their support – and we hope that we earn it by the work that we do to provide STEAM activities to inspire our teenagers (or at least to keep these all-too-bright kids out of trouble)!
If you’re looking for a group to donate to in order to round out your fiscal year, of course I’d say give it to us first; but perhaps I’m a bit biased. The Green Mountain Girls come in a pretty close second, though!
We’ve had a nice summer break and are beginning to get ready to dive in once again to the world of cooperative and competitive robotics! The 2023-2024 challenge will be released on Saturday, September 9th. We’ll begin brainstorming immediately!
This year’s challenge will bring the Arts into play – no longer STEM, but STEAM. How exactly, we’ll find out on the 9th; but we have a few clues from the revised Game Manual 1: we’ll need to make a team-customized game element or two, and this year they’re introducing AprilTags into the game.
Sounds fun, right? I bet you’re thinking, “gosh, I’d like to do that too! I wonder, when do they meet?” Luckily, I have an answer for you: Saturdays, starting September 9th, at our HQ in the Smith Center basement at Burr & Burton Academy. We will meet on 9/9 at 11am-2pm, but more usually we’ll meet from 9am-12pm. And, we’re always ready to welcome new members!
FIRST and Qualcomm present the 2023-2024 Robotics Season, FIRST IN SHOW.
Contact us for more info, and keep an eye on this website if you’re interested in what we’re doing.
What a day! We brought Ahnold up to CVU for the Vermont FTC Championship tournament on February 11, 2023. The team started out before dawn in order to arrive in time to present to the judges in the very first slot at 7:30am.
Then it was on to the robot inspection, where the officials made sure that everything about our robot and game elements was legal. Turns out we’d made a mistake on the size of our custom element, so they clarified that for us and we were able to adjust our ducky rings to suit before our first match.
There were two practice fields laid out for teams to use as needed, which gave plenty of room for everyone to test functionality and work on driving skills. We made sure that our autonomous worked well, and that our drive team knew where to place the robot on the field, and practiced retrieving cones and scoring them. Since we don’t have a full field set up at our workshop, we’d only had the chance to explore the real space of the field once before, with the Cookie Clickers in Bennington.
Coaches meeting, drivers’ meeting; our drivers were Takoda and Isaac, and Carter was the drive coach. Zach was our team’s “human player”, having studied the rules so that he was prepared to set out cones and scoring elements correctly and promptly. The schedule was devised, and the matches began!
The opening ceremony featured a young woman from Afghanistan’s all-female FTC team, who had escaped and were now scattered around the world where they could continue studying engineering. She lives now in the Brattleboro area and is attending college in nearby Massachusetts.
Ahnold worked beautifully! Our autonomous routine was absolutely consistent throughout the qualifying rounds; and our drivers were able to score cones reliably, worked with our alliance partners to create circuits, capped with our custom element, and even managed to park in the right place by the end of the matches.
Between the matches, judges and other volunteers came around to see how all the teams were doing. The atmosphere was one of friendly competition, and we went around and admired other robots, loaned equipment if needed, and generally enjoyed the community. We got some great ideas from the Robohawks for a drivers’ station console, too!
We came into the competition hoping to be in the top 10 out of 19 teams. As the matches went on, we were consistently above that measure! We began to hope.
At the end of the qualifying rounds, not only had we achieved a top 10 ranking, we were fourth overall, and that gave us a sure spot as an Alliance Captain in the semi-finals!
We had enjoyed a very successful round with Mansfield Mechanics United early in the day, and so we were pleased when they accepted our invitation to be our partners. Visions of Nationals danced in our heads…
Unfortunately, our last qualifying round had involved a collision with the arena wall that misaligned something, or perhaps broke it. One of the wheels wasn’t working correctly. Although our medic gave the wheel assembly a thorough check and verified that it was turning easily and correctly, Ahnold limped through the semi-final matches and was not able to advance to the final rounds.
We cheered on the CVU Redhawks, the CVU Robohawks, Hive Mind and Bubbert Innovations as they played out three full rounds of the finals for an edge-of-the-seat finish!
Vermont will be sending both CVU teams to Nationals to represent our state. However, our day didn’t end there!
Awards
The Manchester Machine Makers succeeded beyond our wildest dreams on the field last Saturday. We also were recognized as a team and individually for our achievements:
Isaac Vernon was chosen (once again!) as a Finalist for the Dean’s List Award, which will be selected and announced at Nationals. The team sure did nominate him for a reason! We’re proud of you and glad to have you as our team’s Captain.
The Manchester Machine Makers was recognized in third place for the Innovate Award. From the FTC Award Descriptions information sheet:
The Innovate Award celebrates a team that thinks imaginatively and has the ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their designs come to life. This judged award is given to the team that has an innovative and creative robot design solution to any specific components in the FIRST Tech Challenge game. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to design.
More importantly, the team earned first place out of all Vermont teams for the Control Award, recognizing our programming for both driver-assist functions and for the most consistent Autonomous Period performance of any team that day, with a solid 20 points per round!
The Control Award celebrates a team that uses sensors and software to increase the robot’s functionality in the field. This award is given to the team that demonstrates innovative thinking to solve game challenges such as autonomous operation, improving mechanical systems with intelligent control, or using sensors to achieve better results. The control component should work consistently in the field.
Engineered Printing Solutions for their generosity of funding and support of our members with their time, ideas, and opportunities;
Burr and Burton Academy for allowing our team to use its space for storage and meetings;
Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering for their Hands-On Science and Technology Grant, giving us the opportunity to experiment our way to success;
And a huge thank-you to all of our donors, friends, family, community members, FIRST volunteers, and fellow FTC Teams for supporting us in our quest to become engineers!
Ahnold will be at BBA along with our Engineering Portfolio while we enjoy our February break and then have some more fun with robotics this spring.
We’re on our way! We’ve polished up our portfolio, practiced our presentation, and now we just need to pack everything into the car tomorrow for the early morning drive up to Hinesburg, VT.
We encourage all our friends and supporters to stop by and cheer for all the Vermont FTC teams.*
FTC 16221 Manchester Machine Makers 