[jessjank.]

The No Robots Left Behind in Hybrid Challenge is a fantastic and completely achievable proposal. It's something that with a little collaboration among teams and a desire to continue to raise the bar, we can help foster a sense of confidence and spirit not only in our rookies, but veteran teams as well.

An important part of this challenge is that if you are accepting it, you won't just be giving the teams your code and expecting them to use it as is - you should feel the responsibility to engage them in the process of creating and understanding working code, and leave them with the ability to expand upon the knowledge and experiences you leave with them. Through such inspiration, we will hopefully find significant growth in the abilities of our teams now and in years to come.

The entire Pittsburgh region has readily accepted the challenge. Myself, the Regional Director, members of the National Robotics Engineering Center, and the Pittsburgh Teams have made it the goal of our region to have all teams, old and new in the surrounding area, have a functioning hybrid mode and have been promoting this through weekly programming workshops for all teams at NREC (held by Pittsburgh Referee and NREC employee Tim Friez). NREC graciously created the new RobotC programming system and has been using this in it's workshops to help teams (not just those in Pittsburgh) gain a better functional understanding of what their code actually does and is making sure that the teams gain the ability to write code that works. I encourage, if possible, to expand such workshops to all regions or at least to make it known to teams in need when your resources and aid may be available to them.

I can't wait to see just how successful this endeavor may be! Good luck to all teams and happy programming!