2023 FireBears Season Kickoff

We kicked off the 2023 Firebears robotics season with a shock. All the students ran over to the school lightning quick at 10:30, energized after a big night of socializing and eating ice cream. We set up the stream and sat in our chairs, hardly containing our energy and jittering with excitement. When the reveal started at 11:30, we all became supercharged with excitement for the coming season. The 2023 FRC game challenge is… Charged Up!

Participants must use all their brain power to make links of game pieces (three in a row) to score ranking points and move up in the competition to the finals. They grab cones and cube power cells and set them on three different height platforms to score points and electrify the crowd with excitement. Once teams have connected the power cells to the platforms, they must dock and charge up on a power grid in the middle of the arena, getting extra points if they balance it flat.

Once we reviewed the rules, we broke into small teams to discuss what we wanted our robot to focus on – getting points, which game piece to pick up, defending, or balancing the power grid. After several hours of debate, we decided on our final goals for the competitions. To have a working vision system, score cones and cubes on the high scoring platforms, and balancing the power grid during autonomous and manual sections of the competition. We then all went home with drained batteries, ready to come back the next day.