Towards the end of grade 11, I organized a visit to a nearby highschool with a fantastic FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team – the Templeton Secondary Rainstorms. I met a great mentor through this visit – Warren Lloyd, the team’s coach. Over the coming months, Warren supported me in laying the groundwork to found my own FRC team at my high school. I After countless emails and meetings with my principal, school’s shop teacher, and Warren and Ian Koscielski, the FIRST regional director, I had secured a FIRST grant to cover the cost of our competition registration for our rookie year.

I subsequently hit a major roadblock – our shop teacher pulled out. He wasn’t willing to come in after school to supervise us, and no other teachers in the school were qualified to supervise us in the shop. I did everything in my power to find other options, but they were so unworkable that I had to give up.

I had invested so much into this, and for this investment, Warren decided to offer me a role on his school’s team as a mentor in my grade 12 year. I accepted, and walked over to Templeton Secondary after school to work with the team there.

This is the robot that we built over the course of that year. My hands had a small part in this, and our team’s MVPs like Sam and Elliot deserve all the credit. Most of my contribution was in design concepts and determining which elements of our design were efficient from a points-scoring perspective. Our overall design strategy was one I adamantly pushed for – ditch the limelight computer vision sensors for an “aimbot” turret shooter, and instead position your bot in the same static location and forget about aiming. I’m happy to say this design paid off.

Our bot is scrappy as hell. It’s made of 2x4s, plywood, duct tape, and dreams. We competed against 41 teams from around the world at the FRC Victoria Regional Competition with huge budgets, professional engineer parents who would “help” with the team’s designs, and fully custom CNC-machined and waterjet-fabricated bots. We still as the 3rd best high school in our province, and our functional and clever design skills were recognized as the 2020 FRC Creativity Award winners.

Enjoy some photos of our bot below, and if you’d like to read more about the game, I’ve attached FIRST’s animation of the simplified game rules, or you can google “FRC 2020 infinite recharge” for more info