Full Metal Jackets score victory at Alamo Regional Robotics Competition
(ROCKWALL, TX – April 15, 2015) The Full Metal Jackets, Rockwall High School’s Robotics Team FRC 1296, led their alliance to victory at the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Alamo Regional in San Antonio last week, as well as earning the “Excellence in Engineering Award.”
This qualifies the team for the FIRST World Championship in St. Louis where they will compete head to head against the best teams in FRC.
“This is a big deal for us,” said Bruce Charbonneau, the team’s head teacher. “This is the first time in team history that we have been so dominant at a regional.”
The robot seeded first in the qualification rounds, and went on to draft an alliance. This alliance included FRC 2468, Team Appreciate, from Austin and FRC 2415, the WiredCats, from Atlanta, Georgia. This alliance finished top in each elimination round and went undefeated in finals.
“I am so happy with where we are right now; the students are communicating more effectively and proposing great design ideas,” said Douglas Gault, another engineering mentor and original student. “We have been working for years on raising the competitive level of the team. Those efforts are finally starting to pay off. We are performing in the top one percent of teams that are participating in [FRC] this year.”
Every year on the first Saturday in January FIRST hosts a kickoff day where teams across the globe are introduced to a new competitive challenge. The teams then have a six week build season to build a 120 pound robot that can perform the tasks outlined by the challenge. At the end of the build season, teams compete in large tournaments to try and win their way into the FIRST World Championship. At the World Championship, the best teams in the world compete for the honor of being world champions.
The team previously competed at the Dallas Regional, where it was eliminated in the semi finals and won the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award for its lead mentor, Keith Buchanan. Named after Dr. Woodie Flowers, the MIT professor who co-founded FIRST, the award recognizes mentors who lead, inspire and empower students using excellent communication skills. Keith, employed by team sponsor the PTR Group, has been a mentor for the team since it started in 2004.
The team later competed at the Oklahoma City Regional, where they earned finalist after losing in three matches during a close and extremely hard fought finals. The team also won their second “Excellence in Engineering Award” at the Oklahoma City Regional.
Jake and Elwood Blues, the names of the team’s split robot this year, is constructed largely from VexPro parts provided by Innovation First International (IFI), one of the team’s sponsors.
“We built two robots this year. One robot to stack the totes, and another to score them,” said Michael Bricker, the team’s student president. “This effectively doubles the time in the match for us, since we can have one robot putting together a scoring stack while the other is placing a stack.” The robots also have custom sheet metal work generously provided by Special Products & Manufacturing, a local fabrication company.
“Our sponsors are central to our success,” said Doug, “even though the cost of building a competitive FRC robot is slowly falling, we always find ourselves scraping by after building a robot that can withstand the rigors of multiple regionals. Without support from companies like Servergy, Park Place, Exxon Mobil and our incredible staff at Rockwall High School, I have no clue how we could do half of what we do.”
The team will be competing at the World Championship in St. Louis April 23rd through 25th. A link to the live streams of these events can be found on the team’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/1296fullmetaljackets.
FIRST is a global non-profit organization that provides education and hands on engineering time to students through robotics competitions with a focus on “coopertition” and gracious professionalism. First competitions are broken up by grade level, starting with Jr. FLL for young elementary students, going up through FLL, FTC and ending with FRC, which is aimed directly at 9th through 12th graders.
Submitted by Doug Gault, Team Mentor.
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