This is Chicken Bot Pie’s first weekly newsletter, covering Build Season Weeks 1 and 2. The official build season has finally launched for this FRC season with the exciting challenge, called Crescendo!

Pre-Season Report

But first, we want to update you on what we did during the pre-season (September to December). Our team was very productive and accomplished so much to prepare for the season!

New and Returning Coaches

  • Celeste Hill (Head coach)
  • Michael Scholz (Assistant coach)
  • Karl Boulter (Assistant coach)

Expanding Mentor Team

We have a large number of new and returning mentors volunteering their time to help us, and we will be spotlighting some of them in future newsletters!

New Structure and Training

Our team organized itself into four sub-teams led by elected captains: Build (Parker Olson), Programming (Ayman Mohamud), Strategy (Evan Ginter), and Operations (Milan Darji) for this season to make our team more efficient, with each subteam focused on planning for the season, including training the large number of new members we have.

Project Management – Scrum

With mentor help, we’ve implemented Scrum to keep track of our work items, keep our team of 60 students engaged and improve by looking back to review what worked and didn’t. We are learning a lot of new ideas and terms like “sprint”, “backlog” and “scrum,” helping us stay organized this year!

Outreach

Chicken Bot Pie has had one of the most busy and productive seasons for outreach in recent memory. A few highlights include reaching hundreds of young, future robotics at outreach events at demonstrations at the Minnesota State Fair and the Minnesota Science Museum.

Fundraising

Minnetonka Robotics landed two new grants this year that we are very excited about. This progress has led to a funded regional competition season, but the team will need to raise significantly more funds to achieve all its goals, including back-to-back trips to the FIRST Championship (Worlds).

Crescendo – This Season

Pre-Kickoff

Our student leaders hosted a session two days before kickoff where they taught new members about design principles and game strategy concepts, and then hosted a mock kickoff.

Theme

 FIRST’s theme this year is STEAM (the A stands for arts) and our challenge is related to music

Our Challenge

his is what we’ve been waiting for. On Saturday, January 6, FIRST revealed our challenge for 2024. Working in randomly-selected alliances of three robots, we are going to be picking up soft rubber rings called “notes” from various locations around the field. Our robot has to place these Notes in a low hole in the “Amp” or shoot Notes into a very high goal (the “Speaker”). As usual, our robot will operate autonomously for the first 15 seconds and then we can control it manually for the remaining 2:15. In the last 20 seconds, robots will be rushing to the “Stage” and scrambling to climb onto chains, while a human player tries to toss a Note onto “Microphones” on the top of the Stage structure to get us bonus points. Check out the challenge for yourself in this short video:

Kickoff Event

We watched the reveal video as a team, and then applied the skills we have been learning and refining during the pre-season. We analyzed the 149 page game manual and came up with strategic principles to guide our season. As expected, the rules contain many opportunities and traps. We took a break for tacos, cookies, and drinks. They say that a robotics team runs on food and snacks. Many thanks to our parent volunteers for providing the delicious fuel that kept us going!

Getting Started!

Our shop is buzzing with activity as our team gets to work! Over the last 1.5 weeks, we’ve held many more strategy and design sessions, prioritizing what we will work on based on difficulty in designing and building systems, point values, probability of success, strategic considerations, and other factors.

We can’t wait to continue our build progress and we look forward to giving you the Week 3 report!

Chicken Bot Pie would like to thank our sponsors for their support and encouragement. Without them, all of this would not be possible. Thank you!!

Until next week,
Milan Darji, Operations Captain
Celeste Hill, Head Coach
Minnetonka Robotics / Team 3082 / Chicken Bot Pie