Rome 1 Christopher Rome Ms.

Hofmann ENGL 1101 11 December 2013 The Community of FIRST Robotics For several years, Westover High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina was generally thought to be one of the worst schools a student could attend. I would have to disagree because of everything that Westover offered that other schools did not. Westover has an engineering academy, a health academy, and a FIRST Robotics team, while none of the other schools in the county had these. FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. It was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen. FIRST values teamwork, competition, and cooperation. Kamen has even patented the word coopertition, which is a portmanteau of cooperation and competition. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) started in 1992, hosted in Manchester Memorial High Schools gymnasium with only 28 teams participating. Today, over 46,000 students and several thousand volunteer mentors participate in FRC, coming from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and Turkey, just to name a few. After the competition, awards and trophies are handed out according to its respective category. A few awards consist of gracious professionalism, engineering inspiration, safety animation, team spirit, and, the most coveted award, the chairmans award. These are only a small portion of how many there actually are. Each unique team is given a number based on when they joined. My teams number is 2483, which means we were the two thousandth four hundredth eighty-third team to join FRC, back in 2008. As a member of this community for four years, I hope to give you, the class, an insight into this amazing community.

Rome 2 In order to be a member of the robotics team you had to be in the engineering academy and pay a yearly team due of $25, which is almost nothing compared to what I have heard from other schools. The engineering academy was a special program from a nationwide organization called Project Lead the Way. The academy was designed to teach engineering courses, such as principles of engineering, architecture and design, and computerized manufacturing. As a freshman in this program, I did what all freshman do in robotics, I filed the burrs off of the metal and retrieved tools for the upper classmen. But I didnt want to do that all year, so I asked if I could join the programming team because there were only two people at the time. You may know these two people because they come here to UNCC, Brandon Batton and Ricky Sanders. These two are also computer science majors and taught me almost everything I know about programming, computers, and robotics. Freshman year I sat in on both of them programming and talking about the robot and how it should be. Most of where the information of what the robot was supposed to do came from mentors and students from other teams who talked amongst themselves about which concepts would work to achieve the desired result we wanted. There was a joke between us that revolved around one of the mentors being very vocal about the program needing to work to the specifications of how he thought it needed to way before the robot was even ready to be tested. The mentors in FRC are all volunteers who mentor for fun and because their jobs give some benefits for it. We receive mentors from DuPont, Eaton, and General Electric. Their majors range from computer science, to electrical engineering to mechanical engineering. We have people from all areas of the industry, those who work on the floor and the project managers. Each one is very down to earth and are comfortable with talking to many high schoolers who may not understand all the technical terms that they use. They are patient and will go out of their way to explain to you anything that you dont understand and

Rome 3 need clarity for. The last two years I was in robotics, I ended up being the only competent programmer. What I mean by being the only competent programmer is that I had enough knowledge to program and run the robot smoothly and be able to debug anything that was wrong with the robot, whether it be the program or something physical. There is no formal classes on programming but the mentors are thinking of asking the school board to add a class for this specific purpose. This worried the mentors because they knew I would be leaving very soon, so they assigned two students to become my prodigy during my senior year. Having to teach two students an, essentially, new language is not an easy feat. This happens every year between seniors and underclassmen. They pass off all their information to the next lineup for the following season. I am still worried about them this year, so I am planning on going back because of nostalgia and to help with getting the programming, at the least, started and refresh the memory of the students who will be programming. Talking with one of the two prodigies, Gabriel Tant, he said that he is starting to feel overwhelmed about all the responsibilities of everything that he has to do this school year. On top of being lead programmer/team leader, he is the battalion commander for the JROTC program. When talking to him about the communication, he believes that FIRST Robotics gives him the opportunity to get a glimpse inside the lives of professional engineers. He is able to find out how engineers are able to communicate with other engineers and he finds it fascinating how expanded their vocabulary has become to be an engineer. When questioned about his views on communication within FIRST Robotics as a community, he said that he feels that most of the communication is reserved within the team itself. Only if a team needs help, will it reach out to other teams, asking for advice about their predicament.

Rome 4 The season officially starts on the first Saturday in January when it doesnt fall on the first or second of the month. The rulebook, opening videos, safety animations, and field are all revealed on this day. The rulebook is the formal document in legalese that describes everything that the robot can do on the playing field, what the human players can do with the game pieces, and how the robot should be handled when being moved on and off the field after the match. The opening video is a visualization of the rulebook. It also gives some subtle tips about how to solve some of the problems and goals that the game presents. The safety animation is a short animation about safety in the work area. Which animation is played is determined by a contest that teams who can animate can participate in. Every year is a new contest and hundreds of teams send in their animations. Only one will receive the honor of being played around the world at competitions. The field is where the robot moves and scores on. Every year the field changes and has obstacles and goals, dependent on exactly what the rules state. The average dimension of the fields that I have seen have been about the size of a basketball court. The event is live streamed across the world and the six weeks of building begins. Our team of usually fifty students starts by reviewing all of the official handouts and rules. Our first night together consists of brainstorming, planning, drawings, and a structured open platform of talking. This is where we group the students into areas where they would like to work if there is enough room for them. Generally, the senior in the programming group is the one who is the team captain because that person knows all the workings of the robot and is required to be involved with all aspects of the build. The students are all mostly enthusiastic and motivated to work on the robot and learning about engineering. Id like to think its because that everything they learn in their engineering classes, they can apply it to robotics. They see the real world application of things they learn in class. Being able to calculate how much torque is needed to throw a Frisbee at a certain angle to

Rome 5 a certain height at a certain distance can be complicated, but the mentors and other volunteers are there to help the students apply things they know. During the actual competitions is where the real communication and fun begins. Teams in the pit area, which is a huge semi-open area with designated spots for robots and their crew members, work on their robot, converse with other teams and form pseudo alliances, and talk with official judges and anyone from the general public who happens to be walking by. The competitions are free to the public and encourages everyone to come and see what high school students are doing. Students usually have two distinct vernacular when talking to people in the pit area, based on who they are talking to. One is the well versed and proper way when talking to the official judges. This is important because the official judges are the ones who have a say as to who gets the chairmans award. The other way is simpler and not as much effort is put into it. This way is used when talking to the generally public, mostly because of the assumption that they may not understand many technical terms. What I find the most interesting in the community about its communication is during the games of the competition. It feels almost exactly like what I would assume playing on a football team would feel like. The crowd is chanting, the booming voice of the shout casters can be heard, and the teammates are yelling at each other and communicating what they are planning to do. The most intense moment Ive had during one of these times was in a quarter-finals match where in the last thirty seconds of the match, we were struggling to get the couple more points that would put us in the lead. We had three loaded Frisbees, the crowd is screaming and going wild, my mentor who is there as a coach on the field is yelling at me, my co-driver is yelling, I hear screaming from the other teammates, and I felt the most calm I have ever felt. Everything was clear and time seemed to slow. Three shots later in mid-air, the entire arena was in an uproar. We

Rome 6 won the match by a small margin. The team I was on is jumping and yelling and smiling at this small victory, despite it being an amazingly close game. Going back to the pit area to fix and reset the robot, teams who didnt make it to quarter finals stop by and talk and congratulate us on a close game. The next match of the best out of three was a complete loss and we didnt make it to the semi-finals. Though my prime years for FRC are over, I am sure to return as a mentor to get a completely different perspective of FRC. Each team has their own way of communication and use what works best for them. Many use forums provided by other teams for technical help and general rule clarification, while smaller teams, like my team, will only have an unofficial facebook page and only use word of mouth and school announcements to give updates as to when we will work on the robot. Each team is different and there are rivalries between teams because of mentors, but each interaction is enjoyable. An example of a rivalry because of mentors would have to be my teams most prominent mentor getting into a verbal argument with a mentor of another team because he insulted the way the robot looks. It may have been a tongue in cheek kind of insult, but our mentor picked up on it. During the competition, out mentor jokingly suggested that we tip over the rival mentors robot and cause some damage to it. The competition between the robots is a positive side bonus to being able to communicate and talk with other students and developing communication skills with people in the same area of interest. I would highly recommend everyone to go to at least one regional competition. The North Carolina regional competition is usually held in Raleigh at the Dorton Arena around the time of spring break. I feel that the communication within the FIRST Robotics community should be experienced first-hand.

Rome 7 Overall, FIRST Robotics is a very diverse group from a wide range of backgrounds, all competing for the same goal, to learn more about math, science, technology, and engineering through the playing of games with robots they build. From America to Australia, to England, students around the globe who participate in this community have this in common and understand the meaning of what FIRST is to each other. Through that, they are able to communicate and relate to each other in a way similar to what all other communities for fandoms can. The main goal of FIRST Robotics is to motivate young people, inspire them to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math careers, and push them to spread the word of FIRST and STEM ideals around the world.

Rome 8 Works Cited "FIRST History." FRC RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2013. <http://www.usfirst.org/aboutus/first-history>. "Chief Delphi." Chief Delphi RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2013. <http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/index.php>. Tant, Gabriel. Personal interview. 30 Nov. 2013.