January Newsletter
The beginning of 2019 brought a lot of excitement for FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team 525 the Swartdogs.
On January 5th, we hosted our fifth official FRC kickoff. 20 FRC teams from Iowa and Nebraska joined us, all eager to learn about the new game! The afternoon consisted of student led workshops covering topics including quick build, rules, strategy, and awards. We invited other teams to lead workshops so they could share their knowledge and expertise with other FRC teams too.
On January 20th we traveled to Ames to volunteer at the Iowa FIRST LEGO League State Championship. It was great connecting with Swartdog alumni, now Iowa State University students, who continue to volunteer at this exciting event.
We held a lasagna dinner as a fundraiser at Cedar Falls’ newest elementary school, Aldrich Elementary, on January 26th. We created a robot museum featuring all 18 of our past robots, a game piece from that year, and a description of that year’s game. Videos were shown from matches as far back as 1999. Guests enjoyed driving our 2003, 2011, 2012, 2017 and 2018 robots.
Also in January, we helped build a practice field for this year’s game as part of the Northeast Iowa FRC Coalition, a group of 6 FRC teams which we helped form. Teams in the coalition support one another and work together on huge projects to support FRC in Iowa. The coalition’s first project was creating a full field which would be used in February for the Corndog Classic (our annual week 0 scrimmage).
Throughout the month, all of our work groups worked really hard to strategize how the game would play out, create CAD models and drawings to design and start building the robot, start writing the code for the robot, and create the Chairman’s main essay and mini essays.
Overall, we have had a very busy start to the new build season!