Favorite Match

My favorite individual game from this season was the time we were partnered with Team 118 - "the Robonauts" - at the World Championships in Houston, Texas.

Alliances don't get to practice with their partners before their scheduled games, so when their driver asked me and my drive team partner in the middle of the active match if we'd be willing to let their bot try and lift ours, nobody on either team really knew how if it was going to end in victory or very broken robots. But in the end, the stars aligned, resulting in a perfect tandem climb - definitely the coolest moment of my entire FRC career!

Starting an FRC Team

In middle school, I learned about the existance of FIRST Robotics Competition, and it instantly became a dream of mine to compete in it. However, when I got into high school, I was disappointed to learn that there were zero FRC teams in my area - the closest team was multiple cities away. Thus, it seemed like that dream would never be...

...Until several college students visited my high school looking to start an FRC team.

I remember that first information meeting well - a total of three students showed up, including me - surprisingly, all girls! After hearing the whole presentation, one girl decided she unfortunately wouldn't be able to participate, which left just myself and a girl named Victoria. Despite how far-fetched it seemed - how could we do this with just two people!? - both of us decided we couldn't pass up the opportunity, and founded FRC Team 6844: the Provotypes.

Luckily, the two of us were able to find more interested students in the following months, resulting in a modest-size roster of about 8 for our rookie year. The one thing we weren't able to find, however, was more programmers, so I had to develop the entire codebase - both autonomous and manual robot controls - on my own! Luckily, I had a great programming mentor who was an FRC alumni, and his guidance helped take a lot of the pressure off. I was also one of our two robot operators, which provided great motivation for getting the robot code up and running.