During the 2023-2024 season, follow along as we hear from 4 FIRST® LEGO® League, 4 FIRST® Tech Challenge, and 4 FIRST® Robotics Competition teams from around the world about their season experience and the culture of innovation their team has created.
This is the first set of blogs posts you’ll read from each team over our CENTERSTAGE presented by RTX season. In this fourth and final post, meet Team 4924, Red Beard Pandas, Christiansburg, Virginia, USA.
Our goal: To Not be Mediocre In Our Performance
We are the Red Beard Pandas! AAAAAARRRRRR! Our team members come from various areas of Montgomery County, Virginia with and have a lot of different skill sets.
With eleven team members of various ages from 12 to 17 years old, we are middle and high schoolers. This season, we have eight veterans and three rookies. As a community team, our members attend home or public schools. We bring our hobbies, interests and experiences from art, scouts, sports, family experiences, and other FIRST prorams. Every season, we grow closer as friends because of our shared goals in FIRST Tech Challenge.
Our rookies participated in our annual summer program called Panda Pals. Veterans introduced Pals to STEM, robotics, FIRST principles, using tools, designing, critical thinking and documentation. After eight Fridays, Pals were able to showcase to their families what they learned by completing a project. If there was interest in joining FIRST Tech Challenge, an invitation was extended.
The rookies are looking forward to building with more advanced materials which will be very different from their FIRST LEGO League experience. We are also excited by the challenge of coding a FIRST Tech Challenge robot! We are looking forward to being challenged and then joining together with our new team members to overcome the unexpected.
On September 9th, returning and new Red Beard Pandas were awestruck by the theater and art oriented challenge, CENTERSTAGE presented by RTX. All our members were familiar with the theater terms like backdrop, backstage, audience side, wings, riggings, and stage door. We easily recognized the building of art patterns with hexagon pixels and the making of mosaics. At first, several members did not understand the significance of scoring with flying paper airplanes.
Five coaches and one former Tuxedo Panda immediately related to the paper airplanes and explained their experiences at FIRST World Championships. Before closing ceremonies, all levels of FIRST teams fill a huge arena. While waiting for speakers and awards, everyone starts folding and deploying paper airplanes that travel from great heights and distances. When a paper airplane reaches the center stage, the stadium erupts with cheers!
With the help of five coaches and one mentor, we want to improve our problem-solving skills and communication to build a robot that specializes in helping our alliance partners. We have realized our robot will be mediocre in its performance if it tries to do every task of this year’s competition. Our first competition will be on December 2nd so we need to have a working model soon! Luckily, we will be able to iterate on our designs before our next competition on January 14th.
We examined previous seasons with similar skills like picking up objects and delivering them to special areas like in CENTERSTAGE. After getting inspiration, we brainstormed, discussed and then prioritized how best to cooperate with other teams. After discussing an array of strategies, we are going to design our robot as a “picker”. This allows us to focus on becoming the best alliance partner as our robot will gather pixels and deposit them at a desired location for our alliance partner to facilitate their “placing” abilities.
Our season goal is to foster better cooperation with teams in southwest Virginia and during competitions. Last year, we noticed limited communication and cooperation among FIRST Tech Challenge teams. “Coopertition” was less evident. The majority of robots were trying to perform all the tasks on the competition field with many alliance partners unfortunately working against each other!
FIRST Tech Challenge is very much an enjoyable experience. We, veterans, believe in the fun and education of FIRST Tech Challenge especially if we build a community with friends. We all want to continue to expand our communication skills. Life is nitty-gritty and we want to be knowledgeable about concepts to look at things differently and problem-solve together.
Like
a real theater performance, no one person takes center stage. One robot taking on too many tasks can be
overwhelming resulting in a poor performance. Sharing the challenges increases
the chance of sharing credit for success. Working creatively in our team and
communicating with other teams, we hope for a hit performance for everyone in
FIRST Tech Challenge!
Written by Team 4924, Red Beard Pandas and FIRST Tech Challenge Staff