Conrad Collegiate Academy Signing Day Last year was the inaugural year for the Conrad Collegiate Academy, which partners with Richland Community College to graduate students from high school with an associates degree. The program is quite competitive, and is drawing new students from across the district to Conrad, many of whom are interested in technology and […]
STEM FAIR St. Thomas Aquinas invited us to showcase our latest robot, Whirlpool, for their school STEM Fair event. We had previously worked with the school to start two FLL teams and were happy to participate. The event was a huge success, with between 750 and 1000 participants, and we were fortunate to be given
More Prototyping After roughly a week of prototyping, we unfortunately had questions coming in at the rate of answers. Can we build an effective shooter, despite relatively little team experience, by using online resources to get close and then dial it in? Will a roller or belted intake function properly this year with our preferred
Detailed Prototyping Saturday was a pretty critical day. We basically had 6 hours total of meeting time during the entire school week, and tacked on another 9 hours on Saturday. While the Tuesday through Thursday prototyping was predominately build via rough hand tools, we began to upgrade prototypes to CAD driven detailed prototypes to get
Stu-Bots I arrived home late Wednesday night to my concerned wife wondering “what the heck I ordered”… which can only mean… game pieces are here! With game pieces, we could now play “stu-bots” or “student robots”. This exercise is always valuable for being able to visualize how the game will flow. It also gives us a
Prototyping While the strategy team continues to decide what needs to be built, we decided to start with some VERY basic prototyping to help everyone start to visualize manipulator, field, and game piece interactions. We’ve found that especially with new members, staring at a white board to discuss how “hard/easy” something is for a Weighted Objective Table,
Group Rules Discussion / Intro to Strategy The first half of the meeting was spent revisiting the rules, with a little added context as we all had a chance to let them soak in over the weekend. While we aren’t yet trying to pick a robot design, we began to move past just memorizing a fact (fuel
Yasssssssssss! Time to play robots again. Good Guy Frank, the closest thing FRC has to Santa Claus, has given us a late Christmas gift of STEAMWorks… and we are #excite. Enough open field to play defense, two games pieces to keep it interesting, shooting and manipulating… this is going to be awesome 🙂 Texas Instruments Kickoff
Conrad High School was selected to host an Hour of Code event for DISD students, sponsored by UT Dallas, Code.org, and the Dallas ISD STEM department. The RoboChargers were excited to both get a chance to participate, as well as show off our 2016 FRC Robot – Koopa, to hopefully inspire other students to get
Last week must have just been the calm before the storm… this week was pretty awesome! New Student Recruiting Our primary fall objectives continue to be to recruit new students and train them to a level where they feel comfortable contributing in the Spring FRC season. Some feedback we received in prior years was that