Author: David Brinza

FRC Team 980 participated in the 2022 FRC Los Angeles Regional at DaVinci Schools on March 31 – April 2, 2022.

Our robot competed in every match and show much improvement from the Ventura County Regional held three weeks earlier. Our robot was able to score two cargo elements during autonomous, was much more efficient in collecting and scoring cargo in the upper hub during teleop mode, and was very consistent at hanging from the middle rung at the end of matches.
The competition field was very strong and we found our alliance out-gunned in most of our qualification matches. We had several matches which were very close (including a tie!). Although we finished 34th out of 42 teams, our performance was consistent and strong. Based on our scoring, we should have been selected for the elimination round (unfortunately, we weren’t).

A bright spot for Team 980 was one of our students (Yogini Vazirani) being selected as a Dean’s List Finalists at the Los Angeles Regional! Yogini was cited for her passionate dedication to FIRST and her efforts to promote FRC in Burbank, both her individual and leadership contributions to Team 980 for the past two years, and her inspiration of team mates in promoting the mission of FIRST.

In our first competition of the 2022 FRC season (and first since March 2020, due to COVID), FRC Team 980 participated in the 202 Ventura County Regional, held at Port Hueneme, CA on March 10-12, 2022. Teams were restricted to a minimal crew (due to COVID protocols), but Team 980 fielded a very capable pit crew and drive team.
Our robot performed in every match and was able to score cargo in autonomous mode, collect and score additional cargo in teleop mode, and hang from the middle rung at the end of the match. Due to favorable partnering, Team 980 was ranked in the top 10 at the end of the first day. Ultimately, we finished at 6-5 ranked in 19th place out of 40 teams, but we were not selected for the elimination rounds.
The 2022 FRC Ventura County Regional was a successful event for our mostly rookie team. We learned a lot and immediately started plans to upgrade the robot for our next event in Los Angeles three weeks later.

After the COVID-19 hiatus in 2021, FIRST Robotics Competition is back for the 2022 season!
The new FRC challenge “Rapid React” will be revealed at the Kickoff event on Saturday January 8, 2022.
FRC Team 980 lost its former build space provided by Walt Disney Imagineering last year due to COVID impacts. We have now joined forces with Burbank Unified School District’s NAF Academy. Our robot build and meeting space is now located in the STEAM Lab at Burbank High School.
Team 980 plans to meet both in-person (at the STEAM Lab) and remotely via Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays (5 pm to 8 pm) and on Saturdays (10 am to 4 pm). Team 980 meetings are published in our Team 980 Google Calendar, with announcements and updates provided on Team 980’s Slack #attendance channel.
Note that FRC Team 980 will be following current (LA County) COVID protocols. All of our mentors are fully vaccinated (with boosters) and prefer all student members and visitors to be vaccinated as well. Unvaccinated individuals will need to present proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours of meeting. Masks are required to be worn inside the building.

Following our camp in the summer of 2020, our team decided to take a short break in August as students started their new school year, and our as new batch of seniors began to work on college applications. Picking back up in September, our team met weekly on Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM, discussing updates on design, awards, and electrical work, in addition to college-related topics and advice from our mentors. We continued to have these meetings through to December, and will be picking them up in the new year, with the start of the new season! We’re all very excited to see what happens in the morning, even if it may look slightly different from the type of kickoffs we’re used to. All the best for this new season— let’s do this!!!

Over the summer in 2020 with stay-at-home orders in place, our team had to get creative in deciding how to go about putting on our yearly Robo-camps. One student leader came forward with a plan for a five-day curriculum that he had developed prior, but hadn’t gotten the chance to use. He presented it to the team and the mentors, and got to work immediately. Coordinating the camp itself was a full team effort, with almost all of our students participating in some way— be it through leading groups and teaching the curriculum, hopping through breakout rooms for technical assistance, or even in making Kahoot! games for the campers to play before their lunch break. This time different from past camps, we departed from our Lego Mindstorms-centric curriculum by focusing on design and code, using two days per topic to teach the campers OnShape CAD and Mindstorms EV3 code. Then on the second day of each topic, we would assign them a challenge to complete on their own, and award group members “Sparkies”— awards named after our beloved thunderbolt mascot. We then finished off the week with a spaghetti and marshmallow tower competition, covering the basics of structural engineering in a fun and tasty way. Our camp, with the help of BPL and BUSD, got more registrants and daily participation than our in-person Robocamps had over the past few summers, and our team is really thrilled by how it turned out. We hope to do more!