Yesterday marked the beginning of the second week of the FIRST Robotics build period, set in motion by the launch event that occurred on Saturday January 5th. That morning,  NASA announced the nature of this year’s FIRST challenge to the thousands of kids waiting on tip toes for the competition to begin. The challenge, titled ‘Ultimate Ascent’, combines throwing disks into high-placed slots to score goals and climbing the rungs of a pyramid to gain bonus points in the last minutes of the game (view video here). Vigilant Global and their protégés, the students of LCCHS, are therefore faced with the construction of a robot that must do the following; move about (speedily and accurately), aim, launch the disks, pick up the disks, and climb. A challenge indeed.

After the launch announcement, the students convened with their Vigilant mentors to discuss logistics. They received their FIRST kits; a box stuffed with tech goodies such as motors, cables and duct tape, and then began to elaborate on the finer points of disk launching and rung climbing. During the course of the following week, the mentor and student collaborators built a prototype disk launcher that yielded very positive results.

The upcoming weeks will involve slowly putting together a moving, climbing, aiming robot. There will be more meetings with the students, including the marketing team, whose purpose is to elaborate fundraising ideas and to contribute to the team spirit by creating designs for team apparel, the team robot pit and table, and the robot itself.

Needless to say that both mentors and students are very much looking forward to the next stages of the competition, and have high hopes for their future robot creation!

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