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2017 FRC season is now here and I am so excited for what’s in store. I am looking forward to expanding my FRC robotics knowledge now that I have one year of experience.
Some of my goals for this season are to learn more about the mechanical and programming sides of building a robot, to develop a good plan for strategizing with alliance members before matches and to learn as much as I possibly can.
Before last year I had limited experience working with tools and wiring so this year I want to continue to further expand my knowledge in those departments.
I want to learn more about the programming of a robot because I want to be able to help with problem-solving. We got stuck on a programming issue last year and had to just wait until we could find the answer out because there weren’t enough people who knew about the program to be able to analyze it to figure it out fast with the limited time that we have. The good news is we are going to try programming our robot in python this year which we have all been learning so that should eliminate some of the uncertainty that comes with trying to learn a completely new programming language. Since we have spent a lot of time learning python, I’m excited to learn about how python works with the robot and all of the aspects of programming physical moving parts, which is a new experience for us with python.
I want to get better at being ready with a plan and being less timid while strategizing with our alliance partners. At competitions when our alliance partners had a way that they strategized and were prepared with tools to help them it seemed to often be the case that the three teams always came to the agreement of doing that team’s idea, modified so that everyone could do their best, because they were prepared and ready to present the ideas that they had. It was admirable when we saw other teams who were really prepared and had all of there scouting information together and knew what the other opposite alliance teams could do and how we could play to do your best against them. I hope that with a bigger team this year we can work a little more to have more of that information so that we can be sure not to always rely on other teams to have that helpful information. I also want to work on getting my ideas out there if I think that they would work for every team involved.
I am excited to experience all of FRC again, I’m excited to find out the game, to build the robot, compete, and continue learning. I am also excited to experience new things like watching our new team members go through FRC for the first time and teaching them the things that we learned last year. I’m glad that we have more team members this year because it gives us the opportunity to spread out all the things that we have to do so we aren’t having to choose things that we aren’t going to do because their isn’t enough people to do them. Although I don’t think that you can ever have enough people to do everything because there are so many things that you can do and opportunities to pursue. Which is something that I really like about FRC because there are things for people with a huge variety of interests and talents. I’m excited to experience being a second year team and to be able to compare it to how it was as a rookie team. Most of all I’m excited to experience it all come together because nothing is more rewarding than working really long and hard and seeing an idea that was on paper come to life. Then getting the opportunity to actually use what you made as a team and test it out per say in a fun and engaging way in competition and then fixing what didn’t work and then testing it again. While still having the element of competition by competing with and against other robots, strategizing how to work with people you have never meant before and their robots, and having the thrill of being able to go further and waiting to see if you are going to make it further.
I love learning, especially about things that interest me like computers and robotics. My goal to learn as much as I can is because there is so much that you can learn from participating in FIRST that it can be a little overwhelming so I want to try my best to pick up on all of the knowledge and use my knowledge and skills to best contribute to my team.
To make sure that I meet all of my goals I’m going to do my best to soak up all the things that I learn and to make sure to ask questions when I don’t understand something. I’m also going to put my ideas out more and instigate having a plan and materials to help us during alliance strategy because it’s something that I think we could help us be more prepared for our matches.