2023 Off-Season Recap
End of the 2023 Season
We had an amazing 2023 season which you can read all about in our 2023 Build Thread! As a brief recap, we ranked 9th place at Bonney Lake and became captain of Seed 6. We then ranked 17th place at Auburn and was picked by Seed 6.
Summer
During the summer, we attended many local events. Those being Seattle Pride Parade, Renton River Days, United Way Annual Community BBQ accompanied by 4131 Iron Patriots and FTC 8693 Hazen Scarabs, and KingCon NW accompanied by 3786 Charger Robotics and FTC 8693 Hazen Scarabs.
In these events, we showcased Orion, our 2023 season robot, taught families about FIRST and its various programs, and provided a fun robot coloring page for the kids. During KingCon NW, we hosted a panel with the Chargers and the Scarabs to introduce our community to FIRST and the work that we do within the community. We had a blast representing STEM in our community throughout all of these events.
The events that we attended opened eyes from not only our community, but also our members. Bridging the gap between our team and our community has revived one of our core values as an FRC team, giving back to the community. In all of our events, we’ve been dedicated towards getting kids introduced and interested in the world of STEAM. In the photos below, you will notice that we taught kids how to drive our robot, printed out our own “Draw Your Own Robot” coloring page for the younger kids, and played our season recap video to give an inside look of what we do in Robotics.
Welcoming and Training New Members
To start our school-year off, we welcomed 29 new members to the team! The Leads and Project Managers that have been working since the summer to prepare the team for our Minibuild season. We continued to utilize the rest of our off-season as training for both members and Leads.
Minibuild
This off-season, we decided to keep the structure of our previous training season. The Project Manager team worked over the summer to curate a mock game and competition using elements from past seasons. We took the concept of scaling a set of stairs inspired by the 2019 season, the balance board from the 2023 season, and a goalpost to shoot foam balls into.
Winter Banquet
To end off our Minibuild season, we wanted to emphasize the importance of community building with everything that we have learned over the summer.
Unfortunately, we were unable to finish our robot, but we accomplished as much as we could to achieve our vision. On the bright side, we did manage to complete our swerve bot! This was the first year that our team has ever worked with swerve, so it definitely was quite a hurdle to get through. From the code (of course) not working to completely starting from scratch on our showcase day, we were able to present a functioning robot at the end. Even though we were unable to achieve our full vision, our team has learned so much from this experience as we experimented with a plethora of designs and methods. Now that our team has become familiar with the process of creating a robot, we’ve become prepared to dive into this season’s challenge.
What’s Next?
Our next post will be covering our process as we move through Kickoff and our prototyping phases.
Jasmine A.
Project Manager