Woodland Robotics Returns for In-Person Season

Woodland’s FRC Team 5458 Digital Minds met on Saturday October 23rd to usher in their preseason. After a few preliminary weeks of rebuilding the team after COVID, introducing new members, and getting projects under way, the group is ready to start their preseason. Completely new to the team, the program is the brainchild of the club's outstanding leadership, sourced from students, teachers, and mentors.

The preseason competition will have members divided into smaller teams to go up against one another. In their smaller teams, they’ll plan, design, and build their own robots over the course of a month to eventually compete in a tournament, where they’ll play a game that utilizes robots that are both self-driving and remote-controlled to achieve certain objectives.

This preseason competition is a scaled-down version of what the team normally does. They’ll be using VEX V5 robots, which come in kits the way Legos do, but have enough different parts so that users can entirely customize their robots. This will allow students to get familiar with engineering, assembly, and programming with easy-to-use, accessible materials.

A key point in holding this event is getting team members to learn and practice the Engineering Design Process, which is the series of steps taken by engineers to develop a solution to a problem. In other words, it’s like the Scientific Method for making things. The steps of the Engineering Design Process are being integrated into each team’s construction process. Learning this methodology can help the team practice going slow and steady to make the best quality robots they can. It’s already been successful: the team used the same process to design a product that earned them a spot as international Semi-Finalists in one of last year’s competitions.

This is all being done to prepare students for the FRC competition, which is what the club officially competes in. For this challenge, the team designs, manufactures, assembles, and programs their robot from the ground up. Their workshop is full of tools and equipment that’s used to build all of the components of the robot, using plastic, metal, and even wood. Then they fasten electronics onto the robot, like motors and circuit boards, and programmers will code them so that the robot knows what to do and when to do it.

They don’t make just one robot, though. Each year, their organization, FIRST, holds the FIRST Robotics Competition. It’s an international event that comes out with a new game each year, and each team is expected to build a brand new robot to meet the challenge. Teams take their finished robots to regional competitions, where they can interact with teams from all over the world. Digital Minds, for example, has collected pins from and met teams as nearby as Davis and Sacramento, and as far as Taiwan and China.

Digital Minds is still accepting new members! If this club and its activities interest you, talk to Mr. Watts in S102, or find a student in a maroon shirt with the team name and logo. Membership is free and open to every student, regardless of grade or experience.