This season brings a new challenge: BIOCORE, the 2027 FIRST Robotics Competition game, is part of FIRST’s biodiversity-themed CANOPY season. Our senior students will discover the competition challenge when it is revealed on January 9, then work together to design, build, and program their robot. Our Grade 7 and 8 students will explore the same broader theme through FIRST LEGO League’s BIOGLOW challenge, connecting both programs through an exciting year of discovery, teamwork, and hands-on learning.
BUILD TEAM:
The build team went into the first month knowing we could have a lot to fix in preparation for our off-season competition at Mary Ward. While the shooter was good to go, the intake had some problems. The stub rollers needed to be replaced before our competition. We also needed to build game pieces to allow for code testing.
CODE TEAM:
The code team had to go through all the code to make sure it was still right and ready to go. With little time, they went through all the code and ran tests on the robot to make sure the shooter, intake, and all the other items still worked how they were supposed to.
MARKETING TEAM:
The marketing team had meetings every day to discuss how we wanted everything to be, whether that was about instagram posts, igneous photos, or maybe about future plans on everything we could do with our branding.
Mary Ward
The Mary Ward competition was a replay of last year game. We used this competition to give our team members opportunities to try new roles in competition. Through struggles and problems we pushed through and made it to the third round of playoffs.
The students had a few quotes about Mary Ward:
“We were able to quickly get the robot ready after some of the breakages E.g. having to replace Rio super fast”
“It was off-season so it was the time for new people to be driving; the team took a risk to make sure people got real experiences”
“New drive team members, including a member never on the team before”
“A big goal was new team member integration, part of our wider STEM outreach, we actively pull people into STEM who might not be otherwise; we paired younger members with older students to experience different FRC teams”
New Opportunities
This season, we had the opportunity to acquire an Altmill, opening up new possibilities for manufacturing custom robot parts with greater precision and reliability. Several mentors and students have dedicated significant time to learning the equipment, developing machining skills, and exploring how we can use this technology to improve our robot designs and overall build quality.
