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New Year’s Day!

Well, New Year’s Day has passed for the Gregorian calendar – now it’s time for FRC New Years Day!

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Kickoff is the beginning of the new FRC season and is held at 10:00 am ET on the first Saturday of the year. The heads of FIRST broadcast it live online using twitch. The live stream can be accessed here. Since the live stream begins at 10:00 am ET, it begins at 7:00 am PST, which means that most of the Anacortes FRC students will be at the high school by 7:00 or 7:15. The rest of our students will be going down to Mountlake Terrace High School for one of the WA State Kickoff events along with a mentor or two. The Kickoff event for a team’s region or state is where the team can pick up its Kit of Parts for the year.

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In order to build up hype for the Build Season, FIRST has begun to give out hints as to what the game is about before the game is actually revealed. They released a teaser that exhibited the theme of the game this year, which happens to be steampunk, and it can be accessed here. The first game that they released a teaser for was Stronghold, which was the 2016 game, so the concept is still quite new. This year, they also released 3 DLC (Downloadable Content) packs, which include documents related to the theme for the 2017 game, i.e. posters, backgrounds for social media, and ringtones. The following links download a zipped folder of the packs – Pack 1Pack 2, Pack 3.

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Once Kickoff occurs, the team will spend hours perusing the game manuals that are released for the game and then talk about all of the strategy involved. Each year, the team constructs a small-scaled replica of the game field in order to analyze what possible strategies could be utilized, what strategies that we think that the majority of other teams will use, and how we could combat those strategies. About half of the team participates in the strategy sessions, and the other half of the team spends that time building exact replicas of the game pieces, using specifications given in the game manual, so that we can gauge actual distances, as well as practice on a to-scale field once the robot has been built.

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Here’s to another amazing year with a wonderful group of students, parents and mentors!

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Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland

Are those what I think they are? Reindeer droppings…really?

Every year, during the evenings of the second Friday and Saturday of December, Anacortes Robotics Teams participate in the Winter Wonderland Walk at Washington Park as part of their Community Outreach efforts. As Experience Anacortes explains it, “Local service groups, clubs, businesses and families sign up to decorate campsites with festive lights and holiday cheer.” Throughout the event, robotics students make and hand out free doughnuts, affectionately known as “reindeer droppings.” This gives robotics students the opportunity to chat with members of the community about the Anacortes Robotics program. The teams also set up displays of some of the previous seasons’ robots underneath pavilions decorated with Christmas lights.

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The Winter Wonderland Walk is a way to get the Anacortes Robotics name out into the community, along with all of the other events that the Anacortes Robotics Teams participate in – the Waterfront Festival, the Workboat Races, and the Fourth of July Parade, among others. Another benefit of the Winter Wonderland Walk specifically is that it can be used to recruit possible future team members. The FIRST Lego League and the FIRST Tech Challenge seasons are in the competition phase, but the FIRST Robotics Challenge season has not begun yet, and teams can still register for the FIRST Lego League Jr. season because the season is so flexible – they have expositions instead of competitions. This means that the teams can recruit possible future team members for FRC and FLL Jr. at the event. Most of the other events happen in the summer, so it can be difficult to recruit future team members because none of the seasons will begin reasonably soon after the event.

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Every year, the Winter Wonderland Walk draws more and more people. People come from all around Skagit County to see the different displays, which includes our own display, a Whoville display, a Shell fire engine, and the Boy Scouts’ campfires with s’mores. The event has even started drawing people from other communities, which means that even though the Anacortes Robotics teams are somewhat isolated from other robotics team organizations, people on other robotics teams are coming to the event. This year, members of at least two other FRC teams found their way to our display: Whidbey Island Wildcats Team 2980 and Aluminati Team 5495 out of Snohomish.

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The Anacortes Robotics teams look forward to seeing even more people walking in Anacortes’ very own winter wonderland and munching on reindeer droppings next year!