2018 Kickoff

By Ethan, Evan, Kenna, Charlotte, Abhi, Justin, Karina, and Arjun

Task: Attend the North Texas FTC Kickoff

Today, we went to the Rover Ruckus kickoff! This year's main challenge is getting blocks (gold) and balls (silver) into the main lander. The other side challenges, in order of hardness, are hanging, parking, and placing the team marker. The main upside of all of this means that it is theoretically possible to perform every single function on the field with the same mechanism.

The main non-robot game changes are the elimination of Supers, the standardization of awards, and Worlds spot changes. The one that particularly piqued our interest was the award standardization. Historically, there have been huge disparities between the awards in North Texas and the awards at Worlds. For example, in North Texas, we continually won the Connect Award for our outreach (while in the rubric, it was the award for connecting with engineers). But, at Worlds, we won the Motivate Award instead.

Next Steps

We will do a brainstorming session to figure out are design paths for the next few weeks. In addition, we need to complete sorting of the new members.