[BB] Busy like a Bee

[JohnBoucher]

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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012

Busy like a bee
Good Afternoon Teams,

HQ is a hive of activity. On the first floor we’re prepping fields as fast as we can. There will be 11 trucks on the road this year bringing Regional events to the continent. Michigan and the Mid-Atlantic Robotics Regions have three additional fields they will be transporting to District events. Hawaii and Israel each have a field (because it’s tough to drive a truck to either location from HQ) and as always, we will have a spare field positioned in Memphis ready for rapid deployment in the event of an emergency. This makes for a total of 17 separate shipments scheduled to leave our warehouse this month.

Every year we rebuild the game specific road cases to fit the new game elements and pieces. The field for this year’s game is both bulky and heavy and the engineering department did an impressive job managing to fit everything into place. Because the first floor is full of game specific road cases under construction, the second floor (usually reserved for FIRST Place) and third floor (shared with the See Science Museum) have been overrun by road cases that are being packed with the materials necessary to support Pit Administration, Robot Inspection, the Judges, the Volunteers, Awards and everything else necessary to run a FRC Event.

On the fourth floor, and across the street in our overflow facility, staff are hard at work. Key Volunteer training is underway, the Senior Mentors are planning a Robot Transportation conference call for teams on February 9th and the FIRST Green e-watt saver program has announced a sales incentive for teams. If you remember (or participated in) the 2010-2011 Brandeis Cross Program Survey, the executive summary has just been posted on the Impact page of our website.

At the same time as we’re preparing for events, we’re arranging to test the field and field management system at Week Zero events, and planning for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis. A draft Championship agenda should be released soon (a lot of different departments have a hand in planning this FIRST wide event). I can tell you that FRC is working to change the Wednesday night pit access. Last year FRC teams were allowed to enter the pits starting at 5 p.m. This year we’re trying to make that access available a little bit earlier. The challenge is we have to get the pits set up and the robot crates in position before we can open the doors. As soon as I have an agenda I’ll let you know.

20 days until Stop Build Day
See you soon!