STEAM News

FIRST Robotics Competition 

In the middle weekend of the holidays, MGC’S FRC team, StemGC had our very first competition. We all got up early to be at Blackburn High School at 8 in the morning, that’s where the competition was hosted. The first day of the competition was a practice day, where we had a few practice matches to get a feel for the arena and what the actual games were going to be like. It was the day where we got our robots inspected to make sure they were safe to drive and were not too big, heavy, the wiring wasn’t unsafe, and the bumpers were all at the same height so the robots could less dangerously SMASH into the others. 

 When we first got to the competition on the Friday, we didn’t have anything on top of the robot, just the base. There was another team there, ICRobotics, and their robot was CRAZY good. Their team was helping us throughout the whole competition, and they made this cube chucker for us to attach to our robot. 

The next day was the REAL competition, and it was SO FUN. This was the qualifying matches, where we competed with and against many different teams. By the end of the day we were in 15th. Do you want to know how many teams there was? 15. The main cause of that was flipping a robot and disabling it, getting us a red card. Oops. Accident? Sort of. But on the Sunday, we managed to crawl our way all the way back to tying in 12th with 2 other teams. Despite being one whole game behind.

Throughout the tournament we were well established as one of the favourite teams. An underdog team if you will. Of course, parents who were attending were rooting for their child’s team, but we were most people’s 2nd or 3rd favourite team we were the Commentators favourite team. When the matches were being introduced the Commentator would call out the team numbers and team names and their team would cheer, but when he called out our team he said, Now, my personal favourite team 9991 from Melbourne girls’ college! And everyone would cheer including the other teams and the volunteers. Everyone at the competition was so nice and was always open to help other teams. Our team was the smallest team, BY FAR, only having 3 people, whilst the others had at least 8 or 9 members.  

This competition was an amazing experience that I would totally recommend, we have learnt so much and it was really fun.  

 The FRC was an amazing experience where we got to meet new people, learn new skills, and have fun with our robot. There were 2 teams from Adelaide, 3 teams from Sydney, and 10 from Melbourne. Some teams were school teams like ours, but there were also community teams.  

I am so glad we did FRC!! 

I know this would not have happened if it was not for Ms. Keen! Thankyou Ms. Keen.  Also a huge thanks top Ben who came in after school to help us with our initial build! 

By Emily Chard. Alina Rudd Hansen, Al Pilepich 

STEMgc is recruiting! We want you!