2022 DEC 19 | Written by Collin Fultz, FIRST Robotics Competition Senior Program Director
Kickoff
Saturday. January 7, 2023. Noon ET! It’s the FIRST ® Robotics Competition Kickoff presented by Novelis, and I am so excited to get this season officially underway! Join us live on FIRSTtv. Think you might forget? You can sign up for a tune-in reminder on our Kickoff page.
Kickoff is streaming live exclusively on Twitch. We recognize many schools block Twitch on their networks. Kickoff locations at those schools will need to request Twitch be unblocked for that day or use other means (within school rules, please) to access Twitch, such as wireless hot spots. We will begin streaming content on the feed beginning around 11:45 am ET, and you can use that time to check your connection.
The broadcast will last approximately one hour, and we cannot wait for you all to see this year’s game. A huge thanks in advance to the folks from the FIRST ® community that have contributed to the show!
Teaser
If you haven’t already watched it 1000 times, be sure to check out the teaser for CHARGEDUPSM presented by Haas! Or, if you’ve already watched it 1000 times, why not go for 1001?
Wood Field List of Materials
The team versions of the field elements (i.e. low cost wood designs teams can use to mock up field elements in their space) will be available after Kickoff on the season materials webpage. We will not be releasing the wood field materials list prior to Kickoff because none of the items on the list should be difficult to acquire quickly (and there may have been a game hint tucked into the materials list).
Official Field Elements & Game Pieces
Shortly after Kickoff, AndyMark will have a selection of elements from the official field available for purchase. The elements available for purchase will not be full assemblies of field elements, only those pieces that would be difficult for most teams to manufacture on their own.
A set of game pieces is included in the Season Specific box included in each team’s Kickoff Kit, and more game pieces will be available in FIRST Choice round 2. AndyMark will also have additional game pieces available for teams to purchase.
Not sure an item from an old game would be easy to acquire quickly for any of the recent rookies (or any team that isn’t a pack rat… should any of those exist).
Plywood sheets for something like the 2014 goals come to mind.
Whatever it is, it’s always nice to have a simple field. Makes it easier to build for the average team and a less cluttered field is nice for the drivers and spectators. Looking at you 2019…
Granted, there’s a chance that there’s a very small amount of wood but there’s difference between quickly acquire and easily acquire.
We build our practice field the day after kickoff. It’s helped out a lot to have all of our 2x4’s and plywood purchased ahead of time instead of now someone needs to go out to the store Saturday Night or Sunday Morning.
Is 10 sheets of 1/2” plywood, 6 sheets of 3/4” plywood and 18 2x4’s a game hint?
Leave the game hint materials off the list, let us get the heavy stuff early. Unless, like I said, there’s just not a lot of stuff for this year’s game.
Sometimes its not about complexity but uniqueness and functionality. If casters were on the list, everyone would focus on the 2002 / 2003 / 2009 rolling goals. You would never expect a team to make their own caster but they’re not very complicated or expensive - but the game won’t work if the goals don’t roll
I think the only reason they’d not release it is if there’s no field elements and it’s a completely open field outside game pieces. Maybe I’m crazy.
Edit: after thinking more, I’m convinced FIRST would just have an intentionally incomplete wooden element list if there was just something too revealing about the wooden element list. I’m ready to be wrong on kickoff but I think this has to be the case.
Good point about something like that, I am just worried it is like last years high goal. If you bought last years goal you had an advantage over teams that didn’t.
@Andy_Baker I’m super excited to see the supplier-provided field elements make a return. I recall last year these were very popular and some people had a hard time getting them. Would you be willing to shed some light on the expected demand you are planning for so that teams can make an estimate about how quickly we need to decide on purchasing the field elements before they run out?
No idea. For the basketball hoop example maybe it’s just a couple 2x4s to make it the right height and that’s it so they don’t feel like it’s worth it?
We built the team goal and added a plastic cone on the bottom to help with getting the cargo out of the goal as well as help them be “random” in return distribution. You can see the cone pretty good starting at 1:14 in our reveal video. You can also see the bounce outs it causes in the next couple of clips of said video. We still had some issues adapting to the real goal but the cone did an ok job replicating the agitator. I can’t really complain about our 2022 results so I don’t think we were that disadvantaged without the real thing.
