2010-2011 Season

In the 2010-2011 season, we decided to move on to FIRST Tech Challenge.  Our team number became 4299.  For the 2010-2011 season, The Battery Powered Picklejar heads returned to FIRST, but as a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team instead of a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team. We went to our first FTC competition at BU Academy where we won the Think award, an award given to a team who shows a clear design process, and who documents their work along the way. Between BU Academy and our next competition, we decided to radically modify our robot, as we were not satisfied with the previous design. We sat down and had and had a long brainstorming session about what our robot needed to have for that years competition. We came up with a very specific design and built it over the course of many meetings. We took this new and improved robot to the Arlington qualifier, where all of the hard work at team meetings paid off, and we won the Inspire award. We made some moderate modifications to our robot in the time between Arlington and the State competition, the final design can be seen here. Right before States, our robot was performing great, and could achieve a score of 113 points as seen here. At States, our robot had several major malfunctions due to our robots numerous sensors that our programs rely on. Our robots score went from 113 points a day before the competition, to 0 points almost every run. Although our robot performed poorly, we learned a tremendous amount that year and we can’t wait for the next season!