Starting my sophmore year of High School, I joined my school’s robotics team. We would do a lot of great thing for Hawaii through community service and volunteer work all throughout the year, but more importantlt we got to build robots and compete at competitions! We competed in three different categories: VEX, FTC, and FRC. My favorite would be FRC where we would have long workshop nights from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM every school day and just work on building our robot.
There are competitions all around the world that teams can sign up for and compete in. At these competitions, teams are granted all kinds of awards in different categories such as robot performance awards, machine, creativity and innovation awards, and many more. Not all of the awards are robot/performance related. The one our team would usually focus on was the FIRST Impact Award (formerly Chairman’s Award). The description for the FIRST Impact Award from their website reads:
The FIRST Impact Award is the most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST. It was created to keep the central focus of FIRST Robotics Competition on the ultimate goal of transforming the culture in ways that will inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology, as well as encouraging more of today’s youth to become science and technology leaders.
Due to our teams extensive community service and volunteer work, our team would often win the Impact award which qualifies our team to compete at the FIRST Championships.
Every year I was apart of the robotics team we would qualify for the championship, but the most notable year for me was 2019, which also happened to be my first exposure to coding. Normally, I was apart of the build team where we would machine parts for the robot and put it together. This year however, our team bought LED strips and hooked it up to an aurduino to make our robot light up and look cooler. I spent an entire day from 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM time learning how to code and messing around with the LED strips getting them to light up in different colors and different patterns. This was the most enjoyable day of the build season for me without a doubt.