There’s always that one present under the tree. You know the one. It’s got that special reflective sheen all the way around the rectangular box, and a wide red ribbon trimmed in gold foil. You eyeballed it the first day it magically appeared under the tree in your living room. When you get up in the morning and slink down for a bowl of cereal, you catch a glimpse of it in the of the corner of your sleep-sticky eye and it shimmers under the white lights as you head back up the stairs to turn in after another day at school, counting down the time until Christmas vacation and until the day you will get to open the present on Christmas morning.
Strangely, this is the same anticipation built up before the unveiling of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) game for 2016, which happened two short weeks ago, on Saturday, January 9. Prior to the unwrapping last week, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) released a game hint in mid-October. “In the past,” Robotics director Mr. Couvillon said, “FIRST would release a vague, esoteric picture of something” as a game hint, and “One year they released a picture of a fish,” literally a red herring that revealed little of the game. However, this year FIRST released a video with a medieval theme, even revealing the name, Stronghold. The unwrapping, the unveiling of the annual problem facing every FRC team competing for school pride and “geek cred,” is the prelude to a Spring full of brainstorming, rapid prototyping, Computer Aided Designing (CAD), fabrication, and software design.
Robotics president Michael Mong identified the team’s goal as “being the alliance captain rather than being a support robot, as we have been in recent years.” Mong added that another of the team’s “goals is to win a regional competition,” which would rocket the team to the world championships in St. Louis. Several team members, including junior Sam Saiter, interpret the team goal as “controlling our own destiny.” Overall, the team wants to be proud of their robot at the end of build season, and they are working hard to make it happen.
These robots aren’t cheap. In fact, it’s likely that a team might spend several thousand dollars on its annual robot, not including competition fees. This wouldn’t be possible without the generous support from family, friends and corporations. It’s at one of these corporations’ headquarters, the massive Texas Instruments (TI) complex on Forrest Lane in Dallas, that the Jesuit FRC Team 2848 found itself that Saturday morning for the present unwrapping.
It’s important to know why this unwrapping was so anticipated. Each team has an extremely limited time – six weeks – to digest the challenge, a set of game rules, scoring, robot design parameters, and a layout of the arena where the robots will compete. So, every second counts. In fact, our team attended the TI-hosted event just for the introduction of the game challenge and then hopped right back on the bus to head back to the robotics bat cave so that we could begin the design brainstorming – all in the span of a Saturday morning.
It is worth mentioning that the FRC organization is not an amateur affair, nor are the activities surrounding it. Twenty years in the making, the prelude to the 2016 challenge unveiling was a Monty Python-esque movie broadcast globally on the Internet, featuring none other than the genius inventor, entrepreneur, and FRC founder Dean Kamen. The Monty Python references presaged this year’s medieval game theme, Stronghold. The subsequent presentation of the FRC game detailed the challenges that the robots must overcome, including breaching castle walls, moats, other defenses, and hurling boulders (10” gray dodgeballs) at your opponent’s castle walls, all in the pursuit of scoring points and rescuing Sansa Stark.
If you might be curious what we unwrapped in the shimmering box that early Saturday in January, stop by Santa’s workshop in the basement of the Terry Center and see for yourself.
