In the span of one evening, New Tech was transformed into a robotics arena; fields were built in the Media Center and gym, and the cafe was transformed into a bustling hub full of people from across North Texas working on their robots.
Hosted by New Tech’s very own FTC team; the FTC T league is quite the tournament. Teams from all across the area compete for a chance to advance further in the season. This might sound intense, but it’s quite the opposite. “We might be competing, but we’re all working together”, says FTC president Pranav Nayak (12), who described the competition as “extremely fun and friendly. We all have one goal, and that’s to build the best robot we can, so we help each other, even if we are from an entirely different school.“
The competition was enjoyable for everyone else as well, with plenty of friends and family showing up to watch the teams compete. But what, exactly, were they competing in?
The challenge was for each team to create their own robot that was capable of picking up prisms known as “samples”, and then delivering these samples into either bucket to the side of the arena, or into the center of the arena. “The hard part is figuring out how to score as fast as possible”, Pranav said “ Every team is able to score a lot of points, so we needed to optimize speed as much as we possibly could”
This strategy worked for New Tech’s team, as they were able to place 3rd out of the 12 teams. “It was a great moment when we learned that we placed, we were all so happy, our hard work had finally paid off”, said Pranav.
There will be 2 more T League competitions hosted by New Tech’s FTC team, hopefully, these two will go just as well for the club. As seen in the final results, New Tech did well, but that was not without their hiccups. “ We did great overall”, said Pranav, “But we did have some issues with our robot, especially with the wiring.” Wiring is one of the nuanced parts of robotics, it requires a lot of precision, and there’s a miniscule margin for error. These wiring issues are what unfortunately led to the team losing 2 out of the 6 matches they participated in.
Even with these problems, New Tech’s FTC team continues to work as hard as ever, in hopes of being able to climb even higher in the rankings, and so far they are doing extremely well. “The design works great, we just need to minimize the chances of us running into any errors. We’re already onto the fine-tuning phase of our bot”, said Pranav
This was an extremely impressive start for the club’s season, and we are all excited to see how much they improve throughout the year. If they keep moving forward at the rate that they are; this season will be their longest and most prosperous one yet!
