The Windham Windup team participated for the first time in the FIRST Robotics regional competition in Manchester and won the Rookie All-Star Award along with a trip to the national championships in St. Louis.
Currently, they were trying to collect money from the community for the expenses, which would be approximately $10,000 for the competition next month.
The team is almost ready for the championships, which would be held from April 27-30. They were making adjustments to the robot arm for enhanced performance. According to Josh, they were working on the programming code for the arm as they had experienced a few problems at the Granite State Regional with the arm either smashing down to the floor or coming down too rapidly. They were trying to achieve a better control of the arm via software adjustments.
Scott Kukshtel, the team’s faculty adviser or coach has revealed that a number of benefits would be reaped by the students in the FIRST Robotics program. They run through the gamut by working on the design, then on the construction and testing and finally get the chance to see their creation on the field participating in a real contest. By doing all this, they experience how to solve a real world engineering problem. He was also pleased to see how much his first year team had gained and hoped that they would learn even more from the veteran teams in St. Louis. He stated that he was extremely proud of their accomplishments to date, and attributed it to their team work. The sponsors for this year’s team were BAE Systems and JC Penney. However, more help was needed for the team to achieve success.
Source: http://www.team3467.org