Here at Providence Academy, the robotics team is four main teams and is full of students ready to tackle the projects and to take on competitions.
They have a build team, electronics team, programming team and media team. With these teams, the robotics team gets ready for competitions where they have to build a robot for the competition. Their next competition, in April, makes a quick descent on the the team as they prepare.
The four groups then split into two, the build team and the programming team. After they all decide on the design of the robot, this includes how the robot should look, how to work, and what it should do. The build team then starts to build the robot while the programming team writes codes for the robot. They also built a cart to hold the equipment and charges for the batteries.
Kevan Donohue ‘18 said, “this was my favorite project since there wasn’t a lot pressure put on us to complete it and it was a lot of fun to build and decorate”
In the competitions, the team must have many mini-projects to build throughout the season, which falls under the programming team’s job. Also, the team has to have the robots ready to play a 20-second game with pre-written instructions without a person guiding it. They will attending the regional competition at the University of Minnesota on April 6-9. If they win that competition, they will attended the FRC Championships in St. Louis, Mo. on April 27-30. The team has yet to make it to nationals but go to one regional competition every year.
Co-captain Luke Igel ‘18 said, “our goal is definitely to make it to the championships. Most of our team is mostly made up of seniors who have been a part of the team since its creation in 2013 by Mr. Plucinski. This’ll be their last year on the team and they’ve all come a long way. Everything we’ve learned as a team throughout the past few years has come full-circle.”