Current Year
We are currently: In The Home Stretch!
Yearly Tasks
Fundraising/Outreach
Most of the team's year is spent with fundraising and giving back to the community of Bend. We go around to businesses every week, looking for potential sponsors to help us get to the competitions! It costs a great deal of money, so we rely on the kindness of others to help with our program and our future. As thanks for all the help the community provides, we like to give back at local events, such as the Bend Fall Festival and the Central Oregon Pumpkin festival. The kids love driving the robots and seeing all of the fun activities we have. We fundraise all year long when we're not working on the robot, and couldn't keep the team going without it.
Build Season
The fun part! We have six weeks to build a robot to complete the challenge given to us in January, program it and ship it off. We meet almost every day and work very hard to do the best we can at making the robot. All our fundraising is working towards being able to do what we love. We make a large working robot which can drive around on its own power, with grabbers or shooters or whatever we need affixed all over it.
Competitions
Everything builds up to this. This year we are travelling to Portland and Salt Lake City with our robot to compete against other teams to earn as many points as possible! It is not all about winning, though. The experience is absolutely amazing, and everyone has a blast. One of the core teachings of FIRST is gratious professionalism, and every team that competes is friends with every other team. Whether we win or not, it is an awesome experience.
2010 Game
Breakaway
This years game titled "Breakaway" is a soccer styled game in which each alliance of three teams struggles to score more points than the opposing alliance. Points are scored by kicking soccer balls into goals. There are four goals, two for each alliance, and three sections of the field. One robot from each alliance starts in each section. As the game begins the robots operate in autonomous mode for 15 seconds after which the drivers take control. The robots may move from section to section by climbing over bumps or under a tunnel, with the exception that only one robot from each alliance can be in the defending section at a time. Balls that have been scored are returned to the field by team members via an overhead track. Scoring is recorded as such: 1 point for every soccer ball that makes it into the goal, 2 points for a robot hanging off of one of the two towers at the end of the match, and 3 points for a robot hanging off of another robot at the end of the round.
The 2010 game animation can be seen below or here, if video doesn't load.
The field looks like the image below.
