Well, New Year’s Day has passed for the Gregorian calendar – now it’s time for FRC New Years Day!
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.
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 1, Pack 2, Pack 3.
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.
Here’s to another amazing year with a wonderful group of students, parents and mentors!






