The Cookie Clickers #18650 and the Manchester Machine Makers #16221 are hosting a party at the Manchester Community Library to celebrate the FIRST Tech Challenge AGE – DECODE kickoff on Saturday, September 6, 2025, 11am – 1:30pm. We hope that you all will join us for this second annual Southern Vermont kickoff!
We will begin at 11am in the community room at the Manchester Community Library:
138 Cemetery Ave., PO Box 1105 Manchester Center, VT 05255 Phone: 802-362-2607
As teams arrive, we will form a panel of team representatives to discuss last year’s experiences and this year’s goals.
At noon, the challenge will be released by FIRST, and we will watch the livestream on the big screen to learn the rules of the new game. (If you can’t make it and want to sign up for a reminder to watch the livestream on your own, you can do that here).
Then, we open up the brand new field (thank you, FIRSTinVT!) so that everyone can experience the genius of the AGE: DECODE game, with whatever robots we have from last year, or from the summer’s experiments. Feel free to bring your own robots as well!
There will be pizza for lunch, and each team will go home with a printed manual and a few game pieces.
We hope that you’ll all come and bring your expertise, ideas, and gracious professionalism to share!
Please let us know that you’re coming as a team so that we have enough manuals and game pieces on hand for you!
The team spent two days at the beginning of April competing in the first FIRST Tech Challenge New England Premier event at the Eastern States Exposition (“The Big E”) in Springfield, MA.
This event, similar in many ways to last year’s New England Regional event, was twice the size and fantastic to behold. While our team was specifically invited to this event, other teams earned their spot in their choice of Premier Events. Thus, we had teams coming from Alaska, Colorado, Florida, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Arizona, Delaware, Canada, and Khazakstan in addition to every state in New England.
Teams set up booths with information about their season and their robotics journeys, as well as giveaways. Ben did his best to collect something from every team, covering his t-shirt with pins and stickers. Some of the teams set up games in which to win a memento – Ben, Dhruv, and other team members did their parts and valiantly obtained even the most challenging prizes.
Meanwhile, our drivers relied on Monster beverages to keep up their strength; but on day two decided to stick to coffee. Too much caffeine produces a loss of delicate control of the gamepads, and makes it difficult to steady nerves!
Cordelia performed incredibly well. This season we avoided both bevel gears and chain drives, and the simplicity of the gearing made her chassis very reliable. We did, however, see some trouble with the claw servo, and had some ESD issues that interfered with the autonomous routine. The optical odometry sensor became less reliable as the competition went on, and next season we’re planning to try standard odometry pods to see if they’ll give us the precision we want with the reliability we need.
This was also the first multi-day competition we’d had. With the grueling match schedule, it wasn’t surprising to see that we were not the only team that had increasing wear-related issues as the matches wore on! Even the top teams had break-downs and emergency fixes – they just had fewer, and were more adept at getting them quickly fixed.
Even with the vexing breakdowns, all our team members kept up each others’ spirits and encouraged other teams as well! Miles made time to help the Khazak team with their autonomous routine, and the whole team volunteered to assist at every opportunity to lend parts, run errands, or just bring cheer.
Our fellow Vermont teams performed admirably. While every team had challenges, Vermont teams showed up full of Gracious Professionalism and worked to be their best.
On Saturday, January 11, 2025, we went to the invitational scrimmage hosted at the University of Vermont. Our team has collaborated with another southern Vermont team, Bennington’s Cookie Clickers, this year, but this invitational served as a good chance to get to collaborate with everybody, as we don’t get many opportunities to work with teams from northern Vermont. This year’s challenge is rather complex, and to our surprise we saw that many teams had similar solutions to the challenge. A frequent design that we saw — and the one that we chose for our robot — is a linear slide system to allow the robot to reach this year’s higher scoring bins. Despite many robots having a similar base idea, it was interesting to discuss the smaller differences between every robot. We saw, for example, a number of different claw designs and strategies for how to pick up game pieces. We discussed with different teams about how they designed their claws, and we found things we hadn’t even thought of such as having the claw aligned horizontally rather than vertically.
After we compared our designs, it was time for a round of judging! Many of us hadn’t experienced a judging session before, so it was a great practice for the new members. We discussed our process in designing the robot and our current hardware, as well as our intended strategies. We started the presentation with a strong overview of our different hardware mechanisms, featuring our linear slides, rack and pinion servo, and our wrist and claw mechanism. To follow up our hardware presentation, we discussed our developments in our robot’s software this year. This year, we started by integrating the PedroPathing algorithm for pathfinding, a departure from our previous strategy of writing everything ourselves. Later in the season, though, we found that PedroPathing’s (at that time) lack of a proper Gradle library, and our lack of proper knowledge of the internals, was holding us back. So, at the last minute, our software lead sat down and wrote a block-based pathfinding autonomous, combining ideas and routines from previous seasons, which worked brilliantly. In the presentation as a whole, something that we plan to improve is how we distribute the information presented between team members; some spoke too much, others not at all. Our presentation was decent overall, though, and we have definite targets for improving it.
The last part of the invitational that we were able to attend was the practice matches, which led us to useful discoveries about our robot as well as potential game strategies. The scene was set: our robot waited, ready for action, on the full-sized playing mat, with the other teams standing ready. The suspense grew as the referee counted down the seconds to the moment of truth. Then, as the autonomous portion began, our robot was the only one that moved. We came to the realization that we were the only team with the foundations of a working autonomous. Our autonomous wasn’t anything too fancy yet, as it was just a simple parking mechanism we had recycled from a previous year, but nonetheless we managed to scrap it together for this season. The tele-op portion of the game, though, was a bit more interesting, as all teams had some sort of prepared tele-op system. Many different game strategies were used, but the main one that we saw was the usage of baskets. Our team designed our robot to be able to both score a basket and score specimens on the rungs of the submersible, so we were flexible with our scoring techniques. We tried a variety of different scoring methods, but we focused on getting better at hanging specimens, as the other teams wanted to prioritize basket scoring. We ran into a few technical problems, such as the traction of the claw not gripping pieces fully, though we hope to fix those in the coming days. The last part of the match struck and we raced over to the ascension zone, unrivaled again. In the final section of the game we discovered that we were the only team able to complete a level two ascent, which shocked us again as our ascension system used a similar design to many other teams’.
After some matches, we discussed claw designs with another team, along with the benefits of a horizontal claw versus our vertical claw. They showed us that they too had a vertical claw at one point, but got rid of it because after running some tests the horizontal claw proved to be more effective in sample collection. We hope to re-think our claw to make our collection easier. Since they were nice enough to help us out with our claw design, we helped them out with their difficulties with ascension. They also used a linear slide system to reach the higher collection bins, so we discussed how they could repurpose their slides as an ascension mechanism like we did. It was fun and constructive to provide feedback for each others’ robots, and, overall, we gained a lot of insight and ideas from our discussions. We hope to implement what we’ve learned as we continue to improve our robots, and to continue connecting with other teams to learn as much as we can. These collaborative events allow us to gauge our progress and improve our designs much more than we would be able to do otherwise. As such, we’d like to thank UVM for providing this incredible opportunity for all Vermont teams.
Overall, we are proud of where we are as a team and are on track to perform well in the state competition. We want to go as far as we can, and achieve the best we are capable of. We’re in a good place for this point in the season, and we hope to progress to regional competitions in Massachusetts again as we did last year.
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.
Join us at the library on September 7th between 11:30am and 2:30pm to kick off the next FIRST® Tech Challenge ocean-themed competition season: DIVE: INTO THE DEEP!
Manchester Machine Makers (MMM), a 4-H sponsored FIRST Tech Challenge team, is hosting the annual kickoff of the 2024-2025 competition season for Southern Vermont at Manchester Community Library. At noon, we will watch the FIRST® live-streamed announcement and game animation. With a couple of basic robots, we can drive around the full game field provided by FIRSTinVT and will share printed copies of the new game’s Competition Manual. After the announcement, there will be time to brainstorm!
R.S.V.P.here, orto ftc16221@gmail.com so that we know how much pizza to bring. Donations to cover food and drink are graciously accepted, as are donations to help us fund our robots.
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 kick off and learn more about what is being done to promote STEAM education in the community.
During the 2024-2025 FIRST® season, FIRST® DIVEpresented by Qualcomm, teams will use their STEM and collaboration skills to explore life beneath the surface of the ocean.
Along the way, we’ll uncover the potential in each of us to strengthen our community and innovate for a better world with healthy oceans. Join us as we explore the future.
Manchester Machine Makers at Lamoille Union High School
Today was the day! We all travelled north to attend the Vermont State Championship FIRST Tech Challenge competition, where the team had a successful and eventful day.
It was a rough start- Rufus, our robot, suddenly began having connection issues, switch problems, and more! We had to return at the last minute to finally pass the field inspection, but even after we thought it was working, the next thing we knew it had stopped again. With the help of the Mansfield Mechanics United, our first alliance partner, we learned that the way we had connected our hubs together wasn’t the best way, and they loaned us a cable to get working.
The first match was rough, with the hurried debugging process having reversed cables and left some hardware uninitialized. But in the few moments before the next match the team dove in and got it fixed up, and from there our ranking steadily improved.
The judges gave the team an excellent evaluation on their presentation, and came around during the day between matches to talk further about the robot and the design and build process.
We followed up with successful match partnerships with Insufficient Power, the Cookie Clickers, the Wired Cats, and a CVU team. After the last qualifiers were done, we were in fourth place!
After a variety of negotiations, we agreed to pair with the Wired Cats again for the semifinal round, where we won two of three matches to proceed to the finals. Although we were knocked out of the final round, the Drive team did a fantastic job with Rufus. Despite irregular steering, our alliance built two mosaics in each of our last two games and worked together nicely.
In the end, the team brought home medals as the second place alliance partner, and was honored with the Design Award, and first runner up for the Control Award – and we will advance to the regional tournament in Massachusetts in April!
We have several improvements to make in hardware and software, and Rufus is going to be amazing – but a huge congratulations to the team for their incredible accomplishments today and throughout the season!
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 