Blog

Festival of Champions Day 1

Today was our final day of touring around Boston. We explored the town of Salem before driving to Manchester for the Festival. We arrived at Manchester and took a short break at our hotel. Pretty soon, however, we were off to attend the evening’s reception!

It was great to finally get into the FIRST HQ and see where part of the game videos are filmed. FIRST hosted a great event; there was a ton of food and people to talk to. We talked with Combustible Lemons and found out out more about their team and some of the Winning Alliance teams. With the Festival being the first time that alliances are known in advance, we are curious to know how the competing teams have spent the last two months. We’re sure it will be an exciting set of matches on Saturday!

 

Team in front of FIRST HQ

At 7:00 pm, Dean, Woody, and Don sat down for the “Fireside Chat”. We got to hear their life stories and their answers to a series of questions from the audience. One of our questions to Dean (“Have you ever fallen off a Segway? How did you come up with the brand name?”) was included in the Fireside Chat. (The answers were “Yes.” and “I don’t know.”) Our other favourite question was:

If you three had an FTC/FRC team, what would your name be?
(They had a difficult time coming up with this one) “Zotbot”.

Tomorrow, we’ll be touring DEKA in the morning (with some new team T-Shirts!) and attending a social event hosted by local FIRST teams!

Inaugural FIRST Global Robotics Challenge

FIRST Global is an “olympics”-style robotics challenge where one team from every nation is invited to participate in a global robotics event that builds bridges between high school students with different backgrounds, languages, religions, and customs.

The inaugural FIRST Global Competition is being held this week in Washington DC with students from 160 countries around the world.

FIX IT volunteered to be part of the Global STEM Core where experienced robot builders are matched with a FIRST Global team to encourage them and answer questions as they design and build their first robot. We’ve been working with the team from the Ivory Coast.

Ivory Coast FIRST Global team

While they are in Washington DC, the Ivory Coast team will have the opportunity to attend the 3rd Global Grand Challenges Summit sponsored by the US, UK, and Chinese Academies of Engineering. They won an essay competition to be one of three FIRST Global teams to earn the chance to join some of the world’s foremost engineers at the summit to discuss the 14 Grand Challenges of Engineering – including the theme of this year’s FIRST Global Challenge, water security.

Good luck to the Ivory Coast team!

There’s a live feed from FIRST Global. http://first.global/live

MONDAY, July 17

8:30 AM EDT (12:30 PM GMT) to 5:30 PM EDT (9:30 PM GMT) Competition Rounds 1-3
TUESDAY, July 18

8:30 AM EDT (12:30 PM GMT) to 5:30 PM EDT (9:30 PM GMT) Competition Rounds 4-6
5:40 PM EDT (9:40 PM GMT) to 7:00 PM EDT (11:00 PM GMT) Closing Ceremony