2023 FIRST World Championships

Back in April I volunteered at the FIRST Championship in Houston. 192 FIRST Tech Challenge teams were competing. There were four division and eight playing fields. Add in hundreds of FLL and FRC teams also competing and there were many thousands of kids.

I volunteered as a FIRST Technical Advisor assistant, which meant I was at a one of the fields for the qualifying matches. My role was to help teams at the field get set up and help if possible with any robot issues during match play.

Here the referees are finalizing the match score at the conclusion of a match. It was great having a close up view of the game play. The only drawback being sore feet from standing all day long.

Distributed Computing for COVID-19

I ran across an article Fold for COVID which got me thinking about the old hardware I have literally just lying around. I thought maybe I could put it to use and so far so good. This is a form of community distributed computing where you allocate some of your computer resources to working on various problems. A few projects are specific to working on COVID-19 related issues, either in part or in whole.

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Washington State Pasteur Interleague event

Yesterday December 16 I was with the FIX IT 3491 team in Washington State to attend the FTC Pasteur Interleague event. 35 FIRST Tech Challenge robotics teams competed.

Wasghinton State Pasteur Interleague
Wasghinton State Pasteur Interleague

FIX IT did ok in the robot game, but wasn’t selected for any of the final alliances. But they did very well in the judged awards, winning the Motivate Award, 2nd nominee for the Connect Award, and 2nd nominee for the Inspire Award. 2nd nominee for the Inspires Award qualified the team to advance to the State championship in February.

It was a good year in FIRST Robotics

I have been very busy this past year with FIRST.  The mission of FIRST is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting Mentor-based programs that build science, engineering, and technology skills.

In addition to looking after the FIRST BC website, I’ve been volunteering at FIRST events and supporting team FIX IT 3491.

The big news is that FIX IT won the Inspire Award at the Houston FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship in Houston Texas.

Team FIX IT 3491 winning the Inspire Award in Houston

But there was so much that happened before that.

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