October Newsletter
October was a very busy month for FIRST Robotics Competition team 525 the Swartdogs. We started the month with girls from our team running a workshop at the University of Northern Iowa’s (UNI) Expanding Your Horizons conference for girls grades 5th-8th. The goal of this workshop was to inspire participants by introducing them to C++ programming. Each group of girls had the opportunity to work on basic coding and later tested the code on a robot. The girls also learned how to drive our competition robot.
On October 19, we ran a mentor workshop at our build site for new FRC mentors. This workshop was part of a college class through UNI. It covered topics including design, programming, leadership, and organization.
On October 26-27, we participated in the CowTown Throwdown, an offseason competition, in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. We travelled with team 6630 F.U.N. and new team 7411 CrossThreaded. The goal of this event was for students to learn and have fun. Even though we had a rocky start and lost the first qualification match, we came back and won the rest of them.
At the end of the qualification matches, we had a 7-1 record, and 2.62 ranking score. We were ranked 2nd overall. During alliance selections, we were the first pick by the 1st ranked team 2410 Blue Valley CAPs Metal Mustang Robotics. We were joined by their second pick 4646 Team ASAP and their third pick 4329 Lutheran Roboteers. Saturday afternoon our alliance advanced through the playoff matches to win the finals and win the CowTown Throwdown. We also received the “Driven to Succeed Award”, an award recognizing a team’s overall effort in the competition. It is awarded based on the robot design and how the team shows effort and gracious professionalism.
At the end of the month, we ran an event for our school’s food drive. The event was a competition between all of the 3rd hour classes at our school. Each class could donate cash or food in order to drive our robot and participate in the competition. Each group had 5 minutes and 25 seconds to stack power cubes and see who could build the tallest tower. All of the proceeds went towards the food drive and was donated to the Northeastern Iowa Food Bank.
October was a very busy month, but it was a fun filled one.