Sponsored Team Going to Worlds
We work with many amazing robotics teams in the St. Louis area. Most of these teams are affiliated with an organization that serves as their parent, and helps them with grants and fundraising. There are a few teams for whom SLSRA serves as the proud adopted parent, and one of those teams is Force Green, FIRST Tech Challenge team 10265
FIRST Tech Challenge is a robotics program for students age 14 to 18, it's very popular in the St. Louis area, and for various reasons, it's a program in which SLSRA is heavily involved. FIRST Tech Challenge is organized into regions along state lines, and our region, comprised of Kansas and Missouri, has 215 teams this season! At the Missouri-Kansas championship event, 48 teams competed, and 9 advanced to the world championship. Only 2 of those teams are from the St. Louis area, and we are extremely proud of them both: Bosons, team 3658, and our sponsored team, Force Green!
We are delighted that Force Green gave us a guest blog about their season, below. When you're done reading, please head over to their gofundme page, and help them with the pleasantly unexpected costs of traveling to Houston for the World Championship, April 17-20
FORCE GREEN ROBOTICS
For the first time ever, our team had done the unthinkable, we had made it to worlds! This took monumental effort from all members of our team. At our first ever qualifier, the rookies of the team felt very nervous about going into our presentation; we had even more pressure to do well than we did at our first qualifier. The 15 minutes of the presentations went by so fast, as the judges asked us questions about our logbook, as well as the infamous question about gracious professionalism. After the presentation, the team gathered together to reflect on our progress so far. Overall, everyone decided that we had an effective presentation that showed the judges all of our hard work throughout the year. While scouting out the different teams in the pit we found teams we would like to work with during the competition. Talking to the different teams demonstrated different ideas and approaches to the problem, and maybe how we can improve our own robot later. Although there were times where we were anxious and nervous about the competition, we powered through and made it to the World Championship.
Six of our team members are seniors to FTC and have attended three State Championships in the past, so we already knew what to expect. One significant challenge facing this team in the future is the fact that the majority of our team would be graduating after this season. Therefore, one of our goals at this qualifier was to educate our rookies about the competition in order to keep our team sustainable and functioning well beyond this season. Despite our experience with robotics, we relied on our team leader, Emily, to keep our meetings organized and productive. Furthermore, our seniors had very high expectations for this qualifier. For many of us, this would be our last season with FTC. We hoped to see our countless hours of designing, planning, and practicing pay off at this final qualifier.
The team is very excited to attend the FTC World Competition in Houston next month. As this is our first time at Worlds, we are planning on gaining experience from other teams and connecting with the members to make life long memories.
