The home stretch

Congratulations! 

Every FTC season is part sprint and part marathon.  Milestones like the game announcement, Kickoff weekend, and of course World Championship, are mainly sprints with hundreds of moving parts.  String enough sprints together, with some chances to catch our breath in between, and the season feels like a marathon.  Regardless of the analogy that works for you, we're reaching the end of another successful year.

I hope your year has been a good one.  The 2013/2014 season has been filled with great things.  Teams have continued to grow.  We now have about 4,000 FTC teams worldwide, over 3,300 in North America alone.  That represents over 35% annual growth this year.  The implementation of FTC Super-Regional Championship events gave teams more opportunities to compete and improve.  FTC continued to expand options for teams with the MATRIX kit and additional allowed materials.  The results of these changes can be seen in the amazing robots you've developed.

For those of you who competed this year - thanks!  The community you've created is strong, and continues to attract some of the smartest and most committed coaches and volunteers in the world.  For those of you who are also going on to the FTC World Championship, congratulations!  You represent a small percentage of the total number of FTC teams and each one of you earned their way to St. Louis.  FTC is a 100% merit based competition and those representing FTC at the World Championship have distinguished themselves by demonstrating the values of FIRST as recognized through awards and on the field with their robots.

The finish line is in sight and we're happy to be completing the season with you.  Safe travels to those making the trek to St. Louis, we'll see you there!

Ken
Location: 200 Bedford Street, Manchester, NH 03101, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2015-2016 FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship Awards!

Image
FIRST Tech Challenge Judged Awards Inspire Award – Team 7013 – Hot Wired from Portland, Oregon Finalists: Team 6081 – I 2 R Robotics from West Port Connecticut Team 6389 – The Lazybots from Eden Prairie Minnesota Team 7013 – Hot Wired from Portland, Oregon **Award Winner** Team 7655 – The Q is Silqent from Eagan Minnesota Rockwell Collins Innovate Award – Team 7350 – Watts NXT? from Edison New Jersey Finalists: Team 6022 – TBD To Be Determined, Aurora Ohio Team 7013 – Hot Wired  from Portland, Oregon Team 7152 – Robot Squad from Rochester Minnesota Team 7350 – Watts NXT? from Edison New Jersey **Award Winner** Team 7486 – Team Erebor from Suffern New York Team 9048 – Phiobots from Austin, TX Motivate Award – Team 4855 – Batteries in Black from Portland, Oregon Finalists: Team 4855 – Batteries in Black from Portland, Oregon **Award Winner** Team 5070 – N.U.T.S. from Orlando, Florida Team 5202 – Zip TIE Fighters from Decatur Illinois Team 5220 – RoboKnights from Fremont California...
Read more

The All-Girls FTC Experience

Image
If you've ever attended an FTC event, you’ll no doubt agree that it is predominantly a male activity. For reasons that are too nebulous to catalog and more than a bit fraught to “explain,” boys flock to engineering and robots and all things remotely controlled. That’s not to say that girls don’t flock to it, but the tendency of many, I’d venture to say, is to hang back when faced with the sheer intensity of the boys’ confidence, enthusiasm, and perhaps even obsession. The girls may have just as strong an interest, but they approach it all more obliquely and cautiously. The outcome is often that, in a coed environment, you have a team that is primarily boys with maybe one or two girls, and those girls are the ones who are the most experienced, confident, or simply impervious to intimidation. I’d even go so far as to guess that those girls are there because they were inspired by a male relative, like a brother who was way into LEGO building, or an engineer father. While there’s n...
Read more

FTC Team Purple Gears Awarded a Patent!

Image
Purple Gears Get a Patent! by Rachelle Garbarine Numbers are important to the Cardinal Gibbons High School Robotics Team . None, however, is as memorable as 8,794,386 – the number issued to the team’s first U.S. patent.  The patent, which the team assigned to Cardinal Gibbons, is for a folding forklift. The FIRST Tech Challenge team - the Purple Gears aka Team 2901 - conceived, tested, and built the device as part of its design for the robot it entered in the 2011 national robotics competition known as FIRST (ForInspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge or FTC. That year, the Purple Gears also went to the FTC World Championship in St. Louis.  While it is rare for a high school team to file a patent, the Cardinal Gibbons Team has three filings to its credit. In addition to the forklift patent, which underwent three years of review before it was issued this August 5, the team has filed a second one for a custom treaded wheel; and a third for a ...
Read more