First Day Meeting of the 2026 Season

By Fernando, Nalin, Alyssa, Pavit, Octavio, Owen, Nicolas, and Darsheel

Today we had our first official meeting of the 2026-2027 BIOBUZZ FTC season!

We started the meeting by reviewing basic game rules and strategy, and discussing our observations from Robot in 2 Days. We broke down our prototype bot, discussing what worked well and what didn’t. By breaking down our decisions, we started teaching new students about our design and engineering process, as well as our approach to this year’s game strategy.

Then, we taught all the recruits the fundamentals, including basic hand tools and robot parts like motors, servos, spacers, gears, and different screws. We showed them all of our machinery and explained how the FTC competition model works, including the portfolio and community outreach.

We then had them break down one of our old robots so they could get hands-on experience with the basic tools they just learned about and become more familiar with a robot’s architecture. Through this, they also learned how chains and motors work together, and how spacers and brackets are used.

Finally, we had a group discussion over some initial robot design ideas, including different routes we can take to intake elements and how to shoot them. Our recruits had a lot of different ideas they drew out, and we discussed the costs and benefits of a lot of them; through this, we introduced them to basic physics concepts that they had not yet encountered in their educational journey.