Ryan

Team 5436 - Aluminum Cobblers

During my senior year of high school, I helped with build and outreach for our robotics team. Together, we competed in the FIRST Tech Challenge Skystone competition. The Skystone competition had two parts: an autonomous round and a manual round. The core goal of the game was to stack 2x1 blocks on a platform. Teams competed 1 vs 1 and whichever team scored more points after both phases won. We were awarded the Inspire Award first runner up award at the State competition, moving us on to the World Championship (later canceled due to a pandemic).

Build

I helped brainstorm and build our three robots:

• Mark I - A proof of concept using whatever parts we had around the workshop
• Mark II - A refined version of Mark I, improving upon design flaws found throughout the games
• Mark III - The final form, distilled through trial and optimization

Outreach

To promote robotics in our community, our team partnered with a local makerspace and a library to run Lego Mindstorm Robotics and Battle Bot classes for middle schoolers. In these classes I helped lead coding workshops, mentored the students in engineering concepts, and taught soldering and wiring fundamentals.