Hello everyone!
Our pre-season has kicked off to an exciting start with dozens of new members from all different grades. On our first robotics meet, all the “freshman” on the team dispersed and found their own interests. In the meantime, mentors and returning members started working and teaching freshman what they do and their contributions to the team.
In order to gain more competitive and focused individuals and to deal with the masses of students signing up for the robotics team, a form of tryouts have been created. This is Shrewsbury High School’s first ever tryouts for the Robotics team but they will not be performed like most others. From the first day until the start of the build-season, anyone will be welcome to join the team, but Mentors will keep a watchful eye for those who are truly contributing to the team. Right before the build season cuts will be made to ensure that only the best of the batch makes it into the team. With the new cuts hanging over everyone’s head, work started fairly quickly. By the second week of Robotics most Freshman had already chosen the place where they wanted to work and some had already started learning, especially those in the more competitive areas.
Programming, this year, is filled with anxious new recruits who are learning new coding skills, through several different exercises. One of new programmers on the team named Rishi explains that “the exercises helped us learn the machine language part of Java. We had to do these programs on an application called Microsoft Visual Studio Code which taught us simple but necessary code to help us program the robot in the future. If-else statement, nested loops, making multiple user defined functions inside one program, importing and packages, and finally the BigInteger functions, were only a couple of the codes that we learned throughout preseason”. CADer’s are also working hard to teach the new arrivals on how to use the software and what their role in the team is. A couple new editions to the CADing team have started to create the robot cart in order to practice for the build season and home their newly developed skills.
In Mechanical and Electrical, we see the freshman being guided by our mentors and senior team members in navigating through the labyrinth of toolboxes and cabinets. Besides the simple tools, the new recruits, are learning how to use the larger and more risky (in my opinion more entertaining) machines such as the Bandsaw. The Mechanical and Electrical are working together in making the robots used for last year’s competition and the annual frisbee-launching robot for the upcoming Carnival, Spirit of Shrewsbury, and Parade.
The senior members have started creating small games and stations for the annual carnival at Oak where the robot from last year’s competition will showcases its talents accompanied by a variety of games for youngsters.
From the beginning of September to the end, we have grown from a hectic and undecided band of students to a driven and well formed team. We have completed a huge amount of activities, practice, training for our new additions to gain some experience. All the way from programming exercises to the rebuilding of the robot, the Shrewsbury Team is back once again!