This Saturday, January 7th, the RoboRavens hosted an Ottawa-wide FIRST Robotics Competition kickoff in the Alex Getty Auditorium at LDHSS.
Every year FIRST releases a new game containing several engineering challenges that require high school students to collaborate alongside each other to build a robot within a 6 week “build season”. This year it was a steampunk themed challenge called Steamworks. Steamworks requires a team to score points in 3 possible ways:
- Getting 5” diameter wiffle balls into either a “high/low boiler”, the lower requiring more in order to score the same number of points
- Placing an 11” gear onto a peg to be lifted by human players and used to engage rotors, each rotor requiring more gears to start up than the last
- Climbing a rope during the last 30 seconds of a game, and pressing a touchpad
The RoboRavens were happy to welcome team 2994: The Astechz, team 2706: Merge Conflict, and the alumni run CUFIRST from Carleton University. After the end of the livestream depicting the game, teams separated and began brainstorming ideas and analyzing the game manual. This kickoff is a new beginning of the team and gives less experienced members a chance for them to display what they’ve learned so far.
To view the Steamworks teaser follow this link: https://youtu.be/37GBEBLfhWA
To view the Game animation that showcases the challenge follow this link: https://youtu.be/EMiNmJW7enI
We look forward to hosting the next FRC kickoff in January, 2018 at Longfields Davidson Heights Secondary School in Ottawa!