Good Afternoon Teams,
As of this morning 1428 teams are registered for the 2012 FRC Game (name TBD). I know the usfirst.org website shows a smaller number on the “What events and teams are in my area?” page. That’s because the webpage doesn’t include wait listed teams in the count. Teams will be moved off waitlists wherever possible before second event registration opens on October 27th.
The next Senior Mentor Call entitled “Tips and Best Practices fromTeams for Teams” is this Wednesday at 7PM.
Thursday I will be picking up a Workforce Development Award on behalf of FIRST. That’s all I know about that.
Team registration for local kickoffs starts this Friday. If you don’t pick up your kit at a local kickoff site, you will need to pay to have it shipped to your team location. Do you know where your team will be going? Register early, slots fill up quickly.
The GDC onsite meeting has been rescheduled to the Oct 15th weekend.
Two WPI students are focusing their Interdisciplinary Qualifying Project on FRC rookie teams. The results from their project will be used to support a future NSF grant request. You can help them by filling out this surveyby October 5th.
Dean had the opportunity to speak at the 2011 TopCoder Open and always looking for ways to promote and support FIRST, he accepted their offer to dedicate one of their competitions to a FIRST related issue. FRC currently uses a very effective algorithm written and generously donated by Idle Loop to generate match schedules at FRC competitions. However, some teams still complain to event officials if they believe they or any other team have been assigned to the same color alliance, the same player station, the same alliance partner, or to too many rookie teams, or against too many experienced teams, too many times. TopCoder offered a unique opportunity to explore the inclusion of variables not currently accounted for in the match generation algorithm. FRC requested the design include the ability to turn on and off various attributes and the ability to change the weights assigned to attributes when creating optimized schedules. FRC staff will review the winning algorithm, (and like last time, we will turn the algorithms over to teams for input if we decide we like it enough to seriously consider adopting it), but we are not under any obligation to utilize the winning design. My thanks to team 1251TechTigers who set up a booth at the event and answered questions from participants and attendees curious about FRC.
Does your school get Scholastic Magazine? The September 28th issue of Scholastic MATH featured FRC in a section called Robots Rule!
Kevin Trimble, former student member of team 1304 N. O. Botics (2007-2009 seasons) was seriously injured while serving in Afghanistan last month. Please join me in sending letters of encouragement to him c/o 6965 Mayo Blvd. New Orleans, LA 70126.
The AbilityOne Network Design Challenge encouraging high school students to develop assistive technologies for people with disabilities is underway. Deadline Dec 14, 2011. Details here.
Time Warner is hosting a Super Connector Search looking for cable customers who have connected a young person to the wonders of science, technology, engineering and math. The winner will receive up to $25,000 in grants to the STEM organization of their choice Deadline depends on your
location. Details here.As a reward for reading all the way to the end, I have one email I can’t share, but I can hint about: Watch this blog for an announcement from Dean very very soon.
95 days until Kickoff
See you then!
And then the internet went crazy over the mystery announcement.