Off-season competition serves as teaching tool and experience builder
A gym full of high school students cheer, pompoms in hand, sporting their team colors. Mascots run along the bottom of the bleachers in an effort to further pump up the already excited crowd. Game contenders face off in the center, ready to win.
It’s not a rally—it’s the 2010 California Robot Games.
The 2010 California Robot Games, nicknamed CalGames, is an off-season competition based on “Breakaway,” the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition challenge. Held on Oct. 22 and Oct. 23 at Lynbrook High School, the event, organized by the Western Region Robotics Forum, drew 36 local teams that had competed in the 2010 FRC. FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an organization that aims to foster interest in engineering and technology in students.
Robots competed in alliances of three in a modified version of soccer, where the field has two goals on each side and one foot tall bumps obstructing the robots’ paths. The robots were remote-controlled, with the exception of 15 seconds of software-driven action at the beginning of each round.
After three wins and four losses in the preliminaries, the Monta Vista Robotics Team was picked for the fifth ranked alliance, pitting it against the alliance ranked fourth. Due to multiple technology problems with the MVRT robot, as well as connection issues with the two other robots in the alliance, the team was eliminated in quarter finals.
Nevertheless, CalGames served its purpose for the team.
“Last year our driver, [Arun Kuchibhotla], who had been driving our robot for three years, graduated, so we have a new driver, [MVRT president senior Helena Qin], this year, so we wanted to give our driver some practice at CalGames,” Mechanical Lead senior Abhijaat Kelkar said.
CalGames also provides freshmen and other new members a chance to see the robots in action and get an idea of what they will be preparing for during the winter build season.
“It’s always interesting to see what other teams came up with for the robot, because each team takes its own approach to the game that FIRST gives us, so we use CalGames to give the newer members a taste of what the upcoming competition is like,” Kelkar said.
